A concerned mom has admitted that she refuses to let her in-laws babysit her small children because they refuse to properly lock up their guns. Redditor Katzchen took to the AITA sub to ask for feedback on her decision to refuse her 80-year-old father-in-law and 70-year-old mother-in-law to watch her kids, aged three and five, as they not only don’t keep the firearm in a safe but won’t tell her where in their bedroom it’s kept.
- Keeping the kids from their grandparents is a recent development. As OP remarks, both of her in-laws are mentally sound and quite healthy, and they also love babysitting their grandkids. This wasn’t a problem when the kids were babies and less mobile, but now that they get around easily and get into pretty much everything, the gun poses a pretty serious problem, for obvious reasons. “We taught my son what to do if he comes across a gun, but he’s still a kid. And so, we only visit if either me or my husband can go too to make sure the bedroom door is locked,” she wrote.
- Finding out that OP’s parents can watch the kids set the MIL off. According to OP, her mom and MIL had a phone conversation in which it was mentioned that the kids often go to OP’s mom’s house. This, of course, set the MIL off as she wanted to know why the kids couldn’t come to her house. OP clearly stated that their refusal to lock up the gun was the problem, but the MIL just didn’t get it.
- Her FIL insisted the kids could never get to the gun. Despite the fact that terrible accidents happen with kids and unsecured firearms way too regularly, OP’s father-in-law claimed this would never happen. “I said that I don’t care, there is a gun in the house and they aren’t exactly young, if my son came across it how exactly would they be able to stop him?” the post stated. “He told me it wasn’t even loaded. I asked him to show me and he refused. He said there is no point in keeping it in a safe because it needs to be accessible for self-defense. I said well, then there will be no unsupervised visits.”
- Even OP’s husband is softening to the idea. After the MIL started crying, OP’s husband suggested maybe the kids could go over for an hour or so unsupervised so long as the bedroom door was kept locked. OP still wasn’t comfortable with that and said that “they will not be watching them until I see the gun in a safe, unloaded, and completely out of my kids’ reach.”
- Literally everyone agrees with OP. The comments section was full of people insisting that the mother was fully within her rights and was totally correct in refusing her in-laws unsupervised access to the kids when they’re being so unreasonable about securing the gun. OP mentioned that their shadiness made her question whether or not they had more than one firearm that they weren’t disclosing. Either way, if their gun is more important than their grandkids, that’s on them!
