People often think that their inner circle is the entire world. It's easy to think that the people you know are representative of society as a whole. It's especially easy to do when everyone around you thinks the same.

It's like the famous story, though likely apocryphal, about film critic Pauline Kael, who supposedly expressed shock at Richard Nixon winning because everyone she knew voted for George McGovern. When you're in a bubble, you often don't realize it.

So maybe that's why a high-school-aged op-ed writer feels so confident to essentially speak for her entire generation in an op-ed titled, "High school students (like me) want stricter gun-control laws."

She writes this in the Marin Independent Journal, which serves Marin County, California, which is just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. In other words, not exactly a hotbed of pro-gun rhetoric.

But let's look at the substance and not her age.

As students, we are repeatedly taught to ask questions and think critically. However, in recent years, these questioning skills haven’t been limited to academics.

No, you're really not. You're taught to ask certain questions and think what you're told to think. I've seen this with my own kids and having covered education for other publications prior to writing for Bearing Arms. So you'll forgive me if I don't accept this at face value, especially from someone in a part of the country where people get offended at folks thinking differently than them.

Instead, students have been forced to increasingly ask how safe the school they attend is while thinking about the worst-case scenarios on a daily basis. According to a study conducted by Hamilton College, 85% of students are in favor of stricter gun laws.

Students desire and deserve to feel safe at school. Creating gun-reform laws and addressing what psychologically leads to a school shooting happening will help students achieve this goal. Laws to restrict the use of firearms are important to a safer environment for students.

Now, I'm actually in favor of addressing "what psychologically leads to a school shooting" 100 percent. This is indeed where we should focus our attention and far too rarely does anyone want to talk about it.

But the author also favors gun control, and argues that students desire this.

Students like me read all about the violence that plagues schools across the country. However, no one thinks that the threats of violence will reach their school. On Sept. 13, I did not have school because the Tamalpais Union High School District experienced bomb and shooter threats. We were thrown into the reality of the situation, gun violence was not something we could avoid any longer. These threats are not uncommon in high schools across the United States and students should not feel like they are an expected occurrence.

Students want to feel safe when they walk through the doors of their high school, but currently many of us do not. According to Pew Research, 59% of K-12 teachers are worried about experiencing a school shooting. A big part of creating an environment where students feel safe means creating much stricter gun-safety laws, something that the majority of students want to see happen. It’s crucial to listen to students because they are the ones affected by gun violence and have the most at stake.

What Pew didn't get into was how immediate was the concern. Were these teachers terrified it would happen to the point they were considering changing professions? Or was it the same kind of worry as being involved in a car accident?

Further, people's concerns don't give anyone the grounds to interfere with our right to keep and bear arms.

Let's remember, this is California where this author is living. They have more gun control laws than anywhere in the nation, yet the author still doesn't feel safe. She goes on to advocate for mandatory storage laws, but California has those. Why doesn't she and her classmates feel safer?

As for listening to students because they are the ones affected by gun violence, they're not.

The majority of the victims of so-called gun violence are adults. Even this breakdown that lumps teenagers and adults still shows that the majority of victims are adults, and that's if you assume everyone in the 15-24 cohort was really under 18.

Further, if people's lives are at stake, then how does anyone have more at stake than anyone else? It's absolutely nonsensical.

See, part of the reason most high school students don't get listened to is that most of them don't really understand what they're talking about. They actually haven't learned to think critically because today's schools don't value that skill. They regurgitate facts from a single source, their teacher, and that's kind of how they think things are supposed to work.

But even then, not all high school students stand with the author. She offers no support for her claim that high school students in general support gun control, nor the implication that all of them do.

I know for a fact that it's far from universal. Rural high school kids, for example, often recognize the role firearms play in protecting themselves and their families. As minors, they often have to carry a gun around the homestead to deal with wild and dangerous animals as well as two-legged predators. They don't want gun control like mandatory storage because it would put their lives at risk.

Newspapers like to run these "out of the mouths of babes" style of commentaries, but they often fail to understand that it doesn't matter how old the person is, bad ideas are still bad ideas. Gun control has been a complete and total failure and we see evidence in California's major cities on a daily basis. The author's youth doesn't suddenly change that reality, especially when she seems to have a very sheltered view of reality as it is.