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Hate Saying “I Told You So,” But…
In light of America’s youth getting a field trip pass to skip school and protest the Second Amendment and the NRA, we get this gem from The New York Times: “Unfortunately, when it comes to electing lawmakers whose decisions about gun control and other issues affect their lives, these high schoolers lack any real power. This needs to change: The federal voting age in the United States should be lowered from 18 to 16.“
Almost two years ago I predicted this would be the Left’s next war on common sense in the post Let Children Vote!
For most young adults the heart speaks louder than boring, pesky realities like fiscal responsibility and history repeatedly demonstrating failed big government solutions.
The emotional voter fits the left’s demographic outreach like a dovetail joint. After decades of ingratiating themselves in the power structure of higher education and promoting leftist causes in primary school (ie: global warming) they are eager to now cement their hold on children at an ever earlier age.
The efforts by the left are purposeful. They intend to destabilize elections, decrease the impact of conservatives across state and federal governments. They know that 8-10 million children can easily be organized in schools as a captive audience and transported to polls en masse in GOTV efforts.
Progressives understand that once they own the children, they own the future.
The mainstream media are now supporting extreme Leftist groups who are working to lower the voting age so those who weren’t even zygotes on 9/11/01 can cancel your vote.
The Washington Post analyzed The Surprising Consequence of Lowering the Voting Age where, based on the title, I hoped for some sanity. Nope. After an entire treatise on the benefits of children voting (spoiler: their parents may then also vote more), the very last line in the very last paragraph suggested one caveat: “Research from Norway, on the other hand, concludes that young voters are less mature in how they make those decisions.”
Have no doubt. The Left hates to lose and is working overtime to get power back in both state and federal offices. After decades of pushing their Marxist agenda, they realize their message of open borders, higher taxes, and extremist cultural issues don’t sit well with most voters.
To achieve the change of management they desire so they can get back to growing an unbridled centralized government largely owned by progressive special interests, they need to expand the voting pool, preferably with minds they can control.
They intend to do this by providing voter registration to anyone with a drivers license (illegal immigrants apply) and now to children who have no concept of economic systems, have never owned a business or made payroll, seen what FICA even is, have never owned a home nor have any skin in the game.
But children do have plenty of “feels,” so who better to vote for restricting both civil and religious liberties and the constitutional rights of those they disagree with.
Children, only a few years post sprouting puberty, have no place in a voting booth as their only reference to serious political issues is an embryonic understanding of the world filtered through emotional arguments presented by pop culture, unhinged activists, and leftist teachers.
The voting age was once 21 and after the Left pushed the issue for 30 years, it was lowered to 18 in 1971 under the 26th Amendment. The Left wants to ratify the 26th. After seeing the cultural rot of the past 50 years, especially in formerly red states like California, I agree it’s time to ratify the 26th Amendment — by making the voting age 21 again.
Published in General
Not expecting you to defend the science (I’d say the evidence that there’s something to it is in the fresh young puddin’s). I was trying to come up with a pithy rejoinder for our lefty frenemies who want to lower the voting age to 16. The science they love to tout so much is against them.
WC, I agree. The science is against lowering the voting age to 16…simply by observing adolescent stupidity and foolishness.
The yungin’s behavior might even suggest raising it, even though I don’t support that concept.
As a culture we would do better to invest our energy in supporting our young’s to strive to be mostly grownup by 18, and continue as apprentice adults for a few years.
I know my life experiences pushed me to be fully adult by 18. My brain needed no more baking.
My theory is adults have raised the maturity date because they accept excuses from the maturing adolescent. Experinces have got to influence brain development, and our 16-26 year olds are shielded from much.
Agreed, @julespa. However, the fact (and I believe it’s irrefutable) that 21 year-olds today are markedly less mature than 21-year-olds 30 years ago is a good rationale for raising the voting age — maybe higher than 21!
This.
The hell with that.
Raise the voting age to 35.
Now get off my lawn.
Ha! I once saw an MRI of a 17-year-old boy’s brain next to one of a normal adult. They didn’t even look like the same species. The show was about how teenagers’ brains don’t have fully developed impulse-control centers or something. No way are they competent to vote.
I still wasn’t an adult at 23. I was an idiot. (Hey! Who said “What do you mean, was?”)
As the parent of four grown children I can say with utter certainty that none of them had any dependable level of maturity until they were over 21, and it took the boys even longer. Voting at 16? Give me a break; I wouldn’t even go on vacation without them at that age unless I had a very grownup adult supervising night and day.
In another thread recently merely contemplating the notion of raising the legal age for gun purchasing from 18 to 21 was considered un-American, with the rationale that legal voters, i.e. full citizens, should not have their Constitutional rights infringed upon.
Is it safe to assume that those in this thread who would raise the voting age would accept a commensurate change in the age for legal gun ownership? The same goes for any attempt to lower the voting age.
Granted, most of the suggestions in this thread have been in jest — just don’t joke about the 2nd amendment — but there’s a telling disparity in how each side views the competency of young adults according to what suits their issues rather than with consistent logic.
If 18-year-olds are mature enough to vote, they are mature enough to own guns and make responsible decisions with those guns.
If 18-year-olds are not mature enough to vote, they are not mature enough to own guns and make responsible decisions with those guns.
Is that a fair and apt correlation?
I buy it. I favor a single age of majority that covers everything. You’re either a child or an adult.
I think it is. I think they’re too young to buy guns, vote, or drink, and I’m not even fond of them driving either.
I think it isn’t the age, but how we treat them and interact with our young adults.
I’d say that is not a Constitutional issue, but a social and parenting issue.
Whatever we’ve done to cause this lag in maturity, surely we will reap the consequences for a good, long while.
I wish I knew how to collect data and do this research, but my hypothesis is we do something different now, as our young mature that permits this delay in maturity.
Some kind of mental habit or activity that supports the growth of good judgement.
Maybe it is as simple as too much security, and young don’t get the rush of brain chemicals that foster the improvement and strengthening of the action/consequence cycle.
The brain is amazing, and we don’t fully understand how all the components work together.
It starts with giving trophies to everyone so they never find out what it feels like to lose. Thus they don’t develop life skills. Then they go to college and are told they need a safe space with blankies and coloring books after hearing opinions different from their own. Then Obama lets them stay on their parents’ insurance till they’re 26. My father was married with two kids by age 26.
When I was in college, North Carolina had a wrestling tournament every year for all the schools in NC that had wrestling teams. There were about 30 schools involved. I won fifth place twice, and got little trophies about 8 or 10 inches tall; probably more than I deserved. My son played soccer for a team that didn’t win a game one season, and got a trophy about 2′ tall for participation, I guess.
It is fair. I’m ok with 21 for all guns. Because I’m right of center doesn’t mean I must walk lockstep on every issue. We have argued it, and @HenryRacette wrote a compelling post some time back on it. I am also ok with carve-outs. ie: Parent signing forms allowing their kids to use rifles for hunting in their custody. But yes… what @JudgeMental said… one age for adulthood across the board. Although driving can be 17 or 18. A vast majority of accidents happen with teens.
The greatest percentage of whom are male.
Well, then men don’t get to vote. [Justkidding]
We’re kinda stupid that way. But, by the same token, we win the vast majority of Darwin Awards.
This has been studied and it’s the inexperience behind the wheel that is the greatest factor, not the age. People who don’t learn to drive until they are in their twenties or thirties have similar accident rates in their first years of driving as teenagers.
I’ve seen that too. My oldest has been driving for almost 2 years now and drives safely (as far as I know)… it’s just seeing some of his friends driving that freaks me out. I still see them as the 10-year-olds they once were.
I’m not clear how the current law works: is it illegal for a minor to use a gun, or merely illegal to sell a gun to a minor?
For instance, I’m fine with an age limit for buying alcohol (though I think it should be lowered to 18), but I think it should be perfectly legal for parents to serve a glass of wine to their teens at dinner. It would be better, in fact, for kids to learn to drink in moderation at home under parental supervision than to have their first experience with drinking come at a party with no adults around where binge drinking is encouraged by peer pressure.
To me the main purpose of laws prohibiting minors from buying alcohol, guns, tobacco, and so forth is to strengthen parental authority by making it harder for kids to buy these things without their parent’s knowledge. But I think it should be perfectly legal for a father to buy a gun and take his son to the shooting range or on a hunting trip to teach him how to use it safely.
My son had two wrecks on the same curve under more or less identical conditions. They weren’t serious wrecks, he slid up against the curb and bent a rim in both cases. But I couldn’t get him to understand that you slow down when the road is wet. “But I wasn’t going fast.” He was just going too fast for the conditions.
I often took sips of my Dads beer as young as 10. Wasn’t a big deal in our house. In England, the drinking age was 16. Like anything, you learn moderation from those who practice it.
Parents have authority over their minor children until the age of 18, do they not?
So if the parents support Trump, and know their 16-year-old daughter supports Hillary, could they not simply ground her on Election Day and forbid her from leaving the house to go vote? It seems within the realm of their parental authority.
The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys. :-)
Ha. I always tell my daughter, “Whenever you’re dealing with men, I don’t care if it’s a doctor or a senator or a judge in robes, remember that inside they’re all Howard Stern.”
Some of us manage to mask it pretty well. ‘Course, that’s probably just another ploy.
I agree with this. I think 18 is fine.
I do too. But to get there, we need to reassert that we expect 18 year olds to act like adults. We’ve been letting children extend childhood too much (the area already mentioned frequently is keeping them on mommy and daddy’s medical insurance until age 26) and excusing all sorts of immature behavior by people in their 20’s and even 30’s by saying, “Oh they’re just kids.”