Teaching children about guns

It was not that long ago that rifles and handguns were fairly common items in the average household. Unless you lived in a major city, you probably grew up hunting, or knew someone who did. Even before the 4 Rules were codified by Col Cooper, children were taught to never point a gun at anyone, and how to be safe around firearms. It is only in the relatively recent past that guns have been demonized and taken on this evil persona.

So the secret is not to hide your head in the sand, tell your children that guns are bad and leave it at that. Natural curiosity will get the better of them, and even if there are no firearms in their own home it is entirely possible they will find one in their friends home, or on the street. The smarter thing to do is educate children on guns. Take the mystery and mystique out of them by making them items they have regular controlled contact with. Teach them how to determine if a gun is loaded, how to safely unload it or make it safe, and how to communicate to an adult if they ever come in to contact with one.

How you raise your children is a very personal decision. How you teach them to be safe is something no one else gets to decide. I would never, ever expose other family's children to weapons in my home. But I would be very happy indeed if I knew that, should something truly unforgivable happen and a child were to come in contact with a loaded weapon, that he or she would know how to handle the situation.

One of the more popular plans for teaching your children is, as soon as they are old enough to be safe, to give them regular supervised access. If you carry a weapon, let the younger ones look at it while you make it safe for the night. Carefully unload it, check it, check it again, and then check one more time for that sneaky cartridge that shouldn't be in there. Then, very clearly explain to them that you will let them touch it any time that they want to, as long as they ask your permission and follow your explicit directions while they do it. Once that is clear and they agree, let them hold it. Make sure they follow all of the 4 Rules (you do know the 4 Rules, right?), by setting a good example for them while you are handing it to them. When they have had a short time to touch the weapon, have them safely hand it back to you and then once more go through the routine of checking, checking, checking while they watch again. Put the weapon away in a properly secured location, and then go about the rest of your evening.

It is very important that you keep to your word on this, if this is the path you choose. When they come to you and ask if they can hold the pistol, you must actually let them do it as soon as you possibly can safely. You want to make this as much of a non-event as you possibly can. If the child knows they can handle it pretty much any time they want to while you are around, they will be less likely to want to sneak around behind your back to play with it.

That is not the end, however. In addition to this, you need to teach them a couple other things. There are 4 things you need to get in to their little heads, and you do this by repeating it and having them recite it to you. Those things are:

1. Never, ever touch a firearm when there is no adult present, regardless of what anyone else around them is doing
2. If you do see a weapon, leave it alone and remove yourself from the vicinity as quickly as possible. (Tell them not to run away if there are other children present, because kids have a nasty habit of pointing weapons at moving objects and using them for targets)
3. If another child around them wants to touch the weapon, they should say that it is not a toy, and that they should not be playing with it. Then leave the area.
4. Find an adult as soon as possible, and tell them about the weapon so they can make it safe

Ok, now you hopefully have you children thinking about being safe around weapons. As they get a little older, let them help you clean your weapons from time to time. This serves 2 purposes; one, it gets them comfortable safely handling them, and two, it gets you out of having to clean them all the time. At least for a little while when you first start, I guarantee you that you will rarely have to actually touch the cleaning gear yourself if you do this.

As they get older still, you can start teaching them simple gun manipulations. How to remove a magazine from a semi-auto pistol, how to open the cylinder and eject the cartridges on a revolver, how to open the bolt on a rifle and empty the chamber. They will need a certain amount of upper body and arm strength before this can happen, but start as soon as they are mature enough to handle it.

Finally, as soon as you feel they are mature enough, teach them to shoot safely. By making it something that is supervised but fun, you are making them safer. Single shots to begin, large reactive targets at short distances that they can't miss, all these things start them along the path of safe gun handling. There is no more exciting time in a child's world than when they get to participate in "adult" activities for the first time. By starting them when they are young in safe gun handling practices, and slowly growing those skills as they mature, you can help ensure that a new generation safely joins the ranks of shooters and gun owners .