The gun safety training is actually rather good. It doesnât teach how to use a gun. It teaches kids to not touch guns and tell an adult.
I think the mascot is silly. But hey, if it helps some kid not play with a gun, whatever.
Sure, but thatâs not what the classes are for.
Itâs not the childâs responsibility to be gun-safe. Itâs the responsibility of parents and adults to ensure that children are not exposed to guns in ways that could harm them. The purpose of these classes isnât gun safetyâitâs to normalize firearms in the school lives of children who arenât already exposed to them at home. This is why the NRA chose the word âvictoryâ to describe the lawâs passage.
The world would be a better place if we instead had first-grade alcohol safety classes, lobbied for and declared a âvictoryâ by Diageo.
Except it doesnât work. There was a test done where children were told explicitly not to touch a gun, and then placed in a room with an easily found gun. Guess what? They touched it. They picked it up. They played with it.
P.S. they're going to start teaching gun safety to first-grade schoolchildren in Missouri.
Well thatâs good news. If the instructors are as good as the one in the lead article it will save the children the troubling of shooting each other.
So the alternative being that we just hope and pray that a child will know what to do when they do encounter a firearm while unsupervised.
The alternative is that parents and adults ensure that children are not exposed to guns in ways that could harm them.
You cannot push this responsibility onto children. They are children. It doesnât work. Children are stupid.
Itâs like stranger-danger ads. They make us feel better, and they might help a little, but they blind children to the fact that abusers are usually known to their vicitms, and fill their world with unproductive anxiety. It serves a fear that doesnât correspond well to danger, just as first-grade gun classes serve a business whose interests donât correspond to safety.
It need not be an either-or situation. Adults are already (ostensibly) responsible for keeping children away from guns, but they are not infallible. Why not also teach children that touching guns while unsupervised is dangerous?
Thereâs a bit of a difference between âtold not toâ in that study and âreceived child-specific training not toâ.
We teach kids not to run out into the street, we teach them not to get into cars with strangers, we teach them not to do all kinds of other things that you could easily say that a world of kind, caring, responsible adults wouldnât allow them to even consider, but here we are.
You donât need a gun safety class in schools to say that. Theyâre not a special class of dangerous thing more deserving of a âclassâ than poison safety, knife safety, animal safety, water safety, road safety and so on. Gun safety would, reasonably, be part of a general civic safety class.
But no, there are gun safety classes, lobbied for by the companies that sell guns, because making a big thing out of that gets kids into the guns.
Its entirely sensible to teach gun safety to children. Just as you teach basic electrical safety (donât stick your fingers in plug sockets), or road safety, or not to fly a kite near overhead wires, or not to play on the railway tracks.
Or are guns so evil that the usual sensible Boing Boing ideas of letting children be children and not to isolate them from the world inapplicable?
True, guns should not just be lying around, but children may well come across a gun. Its better that they know not to treat it like a toy and play with it.
This is not about passing responsibility onto children (who are not stupid - that is an awful attitude by the way), but giving children some information about how they can stay safe.
Well, they should be general safety taught by parents and teachers, but obviously theyâre not if there appears to be a need for it.
What got me is that you started off arguing that children should not have any gun education, only now you bring up the idea that this is some nefarious plan by arms manufacturers.
Frankly, if this saves one childâs life, its probably worth it. If it enstills respect for firearms as dangerous items, and eases glorifiation of guns, in a generation of children then its definitely worth it (granted it my not do that).
When my father first taught us how to handle firearms, his first rule was: The gun is always loaded. Treat it as such. Donât believe anyone who tells you it is unloaded. Donât rely on your memory. Itâs ALWAYS loaded.
This rule would have stopped one of my brothers from accidentally putting a round through another one of my brothers, had he bothered to remember it.
There are four rules for gun safety,
- All guns are always loaded.
- Never point the gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
- Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target.
- Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.
You have to break at least two of the rules to shoot someone negligently. (There
are very few âaccidentsâ when it comes to safe gun handling).
I didnât say there should be no gun education at all, just that itâs not the childâs responsibility to be gun-safe, and that the classes donât serve that end anyway.
My question is how is gun safety taught, and specifically does it answer why a child shouldnât touch a gun.
As a child whenever someone gave me a rule I wanted to know âwhyâ â and if they didnât give me a reason, then I just had to find out myself. Do they tell children what could happen if they shoot someone or got shot? Do they show pictures of gunshot wounds? Is the training grisly like a driverâs safety video, or rote like check writing class. (Yes, I failed âcheck writingâ in high school social studies. âWhy do I have to sign the check there?â)
Calling this a âclassâ is pretty generous. Itâs a couple videos and talking points for the teacher, Iâd doubt it gets more than 4 hours of classroom attention over the course of a week.
Poison safety, animal safety, water safety, and road safety are all (at least in my experience) already covered in schools. I donât have stats, but Iâd wager that number of guns per capita in Missouri might warrant adding gun safety to that list there.
And yet somehow a gun safety instructor managed to shoot one of his students.
Funny that.
Or, you could, you know, regulate gun laws so you donât need to teach your first graders to avoid accidentally killing someone. But no, FREEDOM!
Yeah. You keep your pretty guns!
Found the abstract: Teaching firearm safety to children: failure of a program - PubMed
It was a week long course.
. . . there was no difference in gun-play behavior between those
children who did and did not receive the intervention.
