Mothers-in-law and hoplophobia

So, my wife informs me that my mother-in-law now refuses to enter our house. She has yet to have the discussion with my wife that she's threatening to have, but that will come at some point.

I'm curious to know why she refuses to enter the house. The obvious assumption is that it's a safety issue, but I don't think that's it. I think it's purely a moral issue, that guns are bad. The irony here is that my mother-in-law is Jewish and very pro-Israel. (I'm not Jewish, but my wife is, and, by implicit agreement from long before we were ever married, so are my kids.) She has relatives living in Israel who, no doubt, have guns in their homes. She's visited them, and I assume that she was aware that there were guns there. But that's no doubt a different situation.

Even though she won't enter the house, she will still come to pick up the kids to take them for an overnight. I'm tempted to refuse to let my kids enter her house. As compared to a house that contains guns locked up in a safe, her house is a death trap. The stairs to the second floor alone are excessively dangerous: they're very steep, and I've slipped and fallen on them. Some grandchild of hers is likely to fall and break something on them at some point, if not worse.

But that would simply be escalation and unlikely to ameliorate the situation. I certainly wouldn't be doing anything to win her over to reason with that approach.

Unfortunately, she's unlikely to ever have a reasonable attitude with respect to guns. She's well-known for always being right, no matter what anyone else says. She has an absolute inability to see things from a different point of view.

Oh, well, I'm sure this isn't the end of things. I'm not ruling out cutting her off from the grand-kids. Moving elsewhere would probably be the most effective way to achieve that. Especially if it's someplace like Texas. Mmmmmmm, Texas.