This World We Live In (#4)
My children are dancing around the house, singing an annoying but useful little diddy that they learned from a children’s video about gun safety. This, naturally, makes my thoughts wander to the sometimes controversial topic of gun safety.
Notice that I prefer the term “gun safety” over the term “gun control.” In my opinion, everyone should have a basic education in how to safely handle a gun. Whether you believe Americans should have the right to bear arms or not (according to the Bill of Rights they definitely DO), everyone should still know how to safely handle the situation if they come into contact with a gun.
When I was 3 years old, my grandparents on my father’s side bought me a .22 caliber rifle. Not a little pee shooter; an actual rifle. It’s a chipmunk model, so it’s sized for a small child. It now belongs to my children, and my girls, age 4 and 2, have both shot it. The main focus of taking them shooting was beginning their gun safety education. They never held the gun without an adult helping to hold their hands in the proper position and to point the gun in the proper direction. They probably wouldn’t even remember where to put their hands, but they learned two important lessons that day. First, never, ever, ever point a gun in the direction of a person for any reason. Loaded or unloaded or just playing around, guns do not get pointed at people. When they are older I will begin to introduce them to the complicated world of guns as self-defense weapons (being able to discern that your, or someone else’s, life is truly in danger is no trivial matter). Second, they learned that you are never, ever, ever to walk across the firing line without an adult. When we verbally confirm that everyone knows you are crossing the line to look at your target, and everyone has verbally confirmed that they know you’re going out there, then we can go.
Everyone should know what my 2-year old knows about guns, but it’s amazing how many people believe they can handle a gun without knowing those two simple rules. As I got older I took a hunter’s safety course in preparation for hunting with my family. Of course, I had already tagged along on many hunts, and knew the material already, but that wasn’t good enough for my dad, and I’m glad. I distinctly remember learning the appropriate way to handle a rifle while crossing a barbed wire fence: the one thing that stood out as missing from my prior knowledge. Could I have figured out how to do it safely myself? Yup. But knowing the safest way to do it is just a bit safer, and safer is always better.
There are a lot of people out there who really shouldn’t have guns. Criminals, of course, shouldn’t have guns. Mentally ill people should not have guns. Some people who are jerks probably shouldn’t have guns, and people who are uncomfortable around guns probably shouldn’t handle them either. That being said, a lot of people who should not have guns DO have guns. The more people who know how to be safe with guns, the safer we will all be.
That being said, if an intruder ever breaks into my house and threatens the lives of my children, they will get up close and personal with the business end of our household shotgun (kept out of the children’s reach, of course) and I sleep better at night knowing that I have one more tool in my arsenal to protect my beloved family.
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