But laws are supposed to be uniform, and written down. How can these prosecutors and judges define “child abuse and endangerment” to mean anything they want it to, after the fact, without reference to NRS 202.300 (the only Nevada law dealing with kids and guns) and when by doing so they further ignore and overrule the highest law of the land -- the Second and 14th amendments to the Constitution -- which instruct us that the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed”?

At no point do these vital amendments say “Unless there are minor children in the house,” or “unless some low-level local judge so orders as part of a divorce settlement.”

In fact, Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar argues in his 1998 book “The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction,” that the right to keep and bear arms is a “civil right,” a term with a specific legal meaning.

The “civil right” to bear arms was possessed by women even before they had the vote. Children can’t vote, but it violates the civil rights of a 12-year-old black youth if a business owner refuses to let him eat at a “whites only” lunch counter. Doesn’t it?

If government now attempts to use the presence of children in the home to infringe their parents’ right to keep and bear arms, then perhaps -- just as the courts have found it necessary to throw out forced confessions in order to end police coercion, despite their “practicality” -- we as jurors and voters must find laws attempting to bar 13-year-olds or 17-year-olds from “bearing arms” in self-defense or for resisting government tyranny just as unconstitutional as we would find a law barring women from owning guns.

The Founders were not given to adding a lot of unnecessary words. Why does the Constitution speak about our right “to keep and bear arms”? What’s that word “bear” doing in there? If I’m required to keep my guns locked in a safe, separated from their ammunition -- all to “protect the precious children” -- I’m still being allowed to “keep” them. But I’m not being allowed, in any meaningful sense, to “bear” them.

“To bear” means to have our guns ready to hand, to carry them around with us for ready use -- the right Jessica Lynne Carpenter, 14, needed to be able to exercise in Merced, Calif. on Aug. 23, 2000.

Do we give up our constitutional rights when we conceive children? Do those children belong to the state, whose officers can then blackmail us into “voluntarily” waiving some of our vital, constitutional rights in exchange for their provisional promise not to take our children away from us, this time?

“On balance I think it’s more important to protect our children,” says District Attorney David Roger.

Whose children? Mr. Roger is not merely some guidance counselor. Does he mean “the state’s children”?

Giving kids guns prevents crime, says DOJ

The suicide of 12-year-old Syber Wells was not some accident in which a toddler scooting across the floor found there a loaded handgun with an unusually light trigger pull. Society neither can nor should keep 12-year-olds locked in “child-proof” nurseries.

In states with more draconian so-called “safe storage” laws, judges or prosecutors might wrongly argue that such a specific state law overrides the U.S. Constitution, which of course it cannot.

But Geoffrey Wells was not prosecuted under the specific Nevada statute which addresses how and when we can give children access to firearms, quite possibly because the prosecutors’ office wasn’t happy with the many specific exemptions from liability carefully crafted there -- because District Attorney Roger finds that statute “not unduly restrictive.”

The father’s attorney, Gerard Bongiovanni, testified in court at the Dec. 28 sentencing that the Wells children were trained all their lives in the safe use of firearms.

Are our judges and prosecutors free to indulge their own fears and prejudices, their “women’s intuition,” to decide that’s a dangerous practice?

Not when those prejudiced intuitions ignore written statutes and fly in the face of factual evidence.

What is the best available factual evidence on the question of whether kids who grow up around guns are more likely to commit crimes with guns?

In the most thorough study of the question ever conducted by the U.S. government -- a study conducted from 1993 to 1995 by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention -- child psychologists tracked 4,000 boys and girls aged 6 to 15 in Denver, Pittsburgh, and Rochester, N.Y.

Their findings?

-- Children who get guns from their parents don’t commit gun crimes (0 percent), while children who get guns illegally are quite likely to do so (21 percent.)

-- Children who get guns from parents are less likely to commit any kind of street crime (14 percent) than children who have no guns in the house (24 percent) -- and are dramatically less likely to do so than children who acquire an illegal gun (74 percent.)

-- Most strikingly, the study found: “Boys who own legal firearms have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use (than boys who own illegal guns) and are even slightly less delinquent than non-owners of guns”

So -- if they were to base their decisions on the U.S. government’s most reliable scientific data on the subject, rather than on fear, ignorance, prejudice and “women’s intuition” -- judges in child custody cases should always err on the side of placing children in the home where they are more likely to possess, be exposed to, and be taught how to safely use firearms.

Or do the ladies plead themselves somehow unable to comprehend these statistical findings? Will they disqualify themselves from these posts by asserting, “I don’t care what the statistics show, I prefer to trust my own gut feeling that guns are yucky and dangerous”?

(Judge Cheryl Moss did not return my phone calls, asking what statute she cited -- if any -- in ordering Geoffrey Moss to “secure” his guns.)

“Want to dramatically reduce the chance that your child will commit a gun-related crime or -- heaven forbid -- go on a shooting spree?” asked the national Libertarian Party in a May 2001 press release detailing these federal study results. “Buy your youngster a gun.”

100 times safer than swimming pools

How routinely do our family court judges use the opportunity of a custody decision to require Nevada fathers to lock up or dispose of their firearms -- when federal findings indicate they should instead carefully place them in the home with the most guns? In contrast, how often do they base a custody decision on which parent is more likely to keep the children away from swimming polls?

Yes, swimming pools.

In their 2005 book “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Just About Everything,” Stephen J. Dubner and Chicago economics professor Steven D. Levitt point out (page 150) that the chances of a child drowning in a house with a swimming pool are roughly 100 times greater than a child dying of a gunshot in a house with guns.

So why does District Attorney Roger prosecute fathers whose children misuse guns -- but not parents whose children die in swimming pools, a hazard known to be 100 times more dangerous than guns?

Champions of American Civil Rights are now so enfeebled that they probably cheered the fact that bereaved father Geoffrey Wells at least drew probation, instead of being sent to prison for owning his perfectly legal firearms and storing them in a perfectly legal manner.

But if you want to know whether this is about justice -- or about the irrational prejudice against guns harbored in the souls of people like Maria Wells, Cheryl Moss, Kathy Hardcastle, and David Roger, let’s ask the ladies one more question:

As a condition of his “probation,” and even though he is not a felon and has not pleaded guilty to any felony, has Geoffrey Wells now been forbidden the “use, possession or control of any firearm,” in violation of his right “to keep and bear arms” as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution?

Yes he has.

In which case, how is supposed to protect his younger children should a home invader like Jonathan David Bruce come calling?

Oh, wait. Judge Moss issued an order in November, taking Geoffrey Wells’ two remaining children away from him, and awarding sole custody to the mom. Didn’t she?