Children & Gun Safety

[clt46910]

The safest way to keep your child safe from guns at home is...NOT TO HAVE GUNS AT HOME.

The safest way to keep your child out of a automoble accident is...NOT TO TAKE THEM ANYWHERE IN A AUTOMOBLE.

The safest way....You get the idea.

We can come up with all kinds of creative ideas as to how to hide, lock, or carry our guns and try keep them out of the hands of our children in our own home. But what about the neighbor or their friends parents that are not as vigilance? What about the gangbanger or wantabe that is going to bring a gun to school and show it off or hand it around?

TRAINING, TRAINING, TRAINING. The only way to keep your kids safe is that they know about firearms and understand them. Not when they are old enough, whenever you believe that to be. But right now, even from the time they are born. Just as you teach them about anything else.

I grew up around guns, was alway taught never touch them without a adult's permission. Was as normal as breathing, never even thought about doing otherwise. We had loaded guns sitting in the corner of the mud room. (enclosed back porch to you younger ones and city people). They was always there 24/7. There was a lot of us kids around I can not remember any of us ever touching or even thinking about touching a gun without permission. We also would help enforce the rules with the younger children. Was just part of our upbringing.

My daughter is now eight years old, was raised the same way. I trust her completely when it comes to not touching or messing with firearms without my permission. I have set her up fail many times and still do, but she come through everytime. She does shoot, knows about gun safety, and enjoys it. But the the training still goes on and never stops. I trust I can let her go to someone's house and she will know to not mess with a gun and will tell the other children to leave them alone. She will tell an adult about a unsecured gun. She as always been taught to do this, is as normal as breathing to her.

I keep hearing that you can not teach children and they will fail. Never trust them. If you keep that mindset you child will pick it up and they will fail. Teach them well and let them know you know they will succeed, they will not let you down, and will keep themselves safe.

Can you tell I have rather strong feeling about this?.... I just don't by into the whole "kids are not trustworthy" thing.

And for all the PC people that are going to slam me...I do put all my guns aways when her friends visit our home. Yes, I will trust her when she is a teenager.

[pax]

Chuck ~

I absolutely agree with you about the importance of training.

As I said in my post, child-proofing is a temporary solution to a permanent problem.

That said...

And for all the PC people that are going to slam me...I do put all my guns aways when her friends visit our home. Yes, I will trust her when she is a teenager.

Free advice from a mom to teenagers here. Don't make any promises about what you'll do when she's a teenager, until she's a teenager.

pax

[Glenn E. Meyer]

A teenage story:

1. Kid is an honor student - straight A's
2. Always obeyed parents - no sassing back, etc.
3. Gets his drivers license at 16, perfect scores in Drivers ed.
4. Dad swears he is wonderful kid and always listens. Dad is the master, patriarch, spirtual leader and kid is his loyal disciple.
5. Day after gets license, kid asks to drive Dads' pride and joy around the block. It is a souped up Chevy Nova with a 496 blah, blah. Dad says only if you go around the block.
6. Wonder child picks up a friend, crashes into tree at 100 mph and is killed.

This dad swore up and down what a great kid he had and the evidence documented it.

Just as all guns are always loaded, you cannot blithely assume your kids are always going to 'obey' your rules around guns. It is not PC crap, it is reality. In fact, the risk is a kind of conservative PC crap of parents who assume that their rules are obeyed as law, that the kids don't have secret lives or that a momentary pressure can't lead to problems.

However, I believe in Darwin and so those who just want to trust lectures and not have a careful view about unsupervised access to firearms by kids can go give one for evolution.

We have so much trouble with kids doing drugs and committing suicide that I take a very jaundiced view of those who swear their kids won't do XYZ and in fact the more sure they are - the more I wonder.

[20cows]

Quote:
The pistol has a 24 pound recoil spring that made it impossible for the children to rack the slide until they were mature enough physically and mentally.

Don't trust that.

1) Kids are sometimes stronger than you expect they will be.

My wife still can't rack it.

[clt46910]

Pax, point taken...I still think I will be able to trust her. If you do not lose your connection with your children you will be able to trust them. To many people are too busy to take the time to talk to their children or even know who their friends are. I spent a lot of time with kids over the years as the single family friend. Saw a lot of different ways to raise kids, saw what worked and what did not work. Saw what kids did to fool their parents and watched kids work with their parents.

Glenn...After over about a 100 years(the only ones I can account for) of children being raised like this in our family we have never had one gun related accident. Except for my father that had an eye damaged when a piece of .22 casing hit him in the eye from a malfuntioning gun. It is not an assumption but a fact. It has worked for many years for our family with a lot of kids, I think I will stay with what works.

The kid in your story put on a good front with his parents. How did he get away with it? Maybe the parents was not as involved with him as they should have been? Maybe should have looked farther then face value. They are your children, look past the front they put up for you. I see a lot of people that are like your friend, the kids puts on the front that his parents wants and they never sit down and talk to them and find out what is really going on. If your kid has a secret life, then you are not paying enough attention to what your kid is doing. You are not in his life enough. They may not like it but get into the middle of their life. Know what is going on and what they are thinking. They will talk to you if you make the effort.

Before you tell me it will not work...it does. Seen it work many times, and still working today.

[pax]

clt46910,

Let me try it again.

After your child is raised, you might have the credentials to make that speech.

Right now, your daughter is not the same person she will be eight years from now. That's not a bad thing and it's not a good thing. It's not a threat or a promise. It's a certainty. Every bit as certain as death and more certain than taxes is the fact that human beings change as they develop.

Yep, it takes a lot of time to raise a child -- more time and considerably more attention than most parents these days manage to devote to the task. But it's dangerous to confuse children with angels, and even a perfect father can have rebellious children (the Prodigal Son's dad was symbolic of who?)

The rapids are still ahead of you, not behind you yet, and while you've seen what you think you are doing work for others, you don't yet know what your family's ride through the rapids is going to be like.

pax

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[pax]

20cows ~

Unload the gun.

Check that it's unloaded.

Check again.

Check one more time.

Then take it and push the front top edge of the slide into a hard surface, like the edge of a table. You could lean a little weight on it, say as much as a small child weighs. Back comes the slide, easy as pie. And that took no muscular strength whatsoever.

pax

[losangeles]

Great tip about training as way to ensure safety with kids!

[clt46910]

Pax...I am 57, this is my youngest child. I already have the credentials to make the speech. Like I said, it has worked before and it will work again. Not just with me, but with a lot of my family. We have no children in jail, no children on drugs, we have had a few traffic tickets. Most of the grown ones have good educations and good jobs. I am talking not only my children but those of my brothers, sisters, and cousins. You put the time and efford into your child and you will see the results.

To assume that things will not work out or that your child will in someway fail you just gives both you and the child the mindset to fail. That seems to be the accepted idea today. It is a crap shoot if your child comes out OK or not. That is not accepted in my family. The child is given the training and guidance to succeed. Not just in the early years but in their teen years also. Don't give up on them just because it gets harder.

I would hope my daughter will not be the same person in eight years. She will be more mature, responsible, and knowledgeable then she is today. There is no such thing as a perfect father, just as there is no such thing as a perfect child. But there are good fathers and good children.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

The hand of biology may reach out. Some depressions, schizophrenias and the like clearly have neurological causes. They develop slowly, even in the best kids and you can see a good kid sink into troubled waters.

While some branch of the family may not have trouble - you never know when some recessive genetic horror might combine in your kid.

It also the case that for some reason, your kids might face a stressor that the family has not faced before. A stress-diathesis model predicts than then you might see a crack.

Since that can happen and kids can pull the wool over your eyes, it would be my choice that I would not allow kids up through the roughest of the teen years unsupervised access to loaded guns. My call - my caution is that you cannot guarantee that you know your kids' lives, stresses and biology.

You give kids' curfews for the same reasons. I'm 57 also and a psychologist, and a father. I see too many good parents with troubled kids. There are forces that lectures don't touch and genetics/biological surprises.

[clt46910]

Glenn...I agree that could happen and it has. That could be something that would be out of my control. So is the fact that a careless driver could hit my child and kill them. Or they may fall asleep, get careless while driving and kill themself or others. Then should I not allow her to drive a car?

With those things possible why do we give them access to the most dangerous weapon of all? A moving vehicle. The Possibility of some "recessive genetic horror" is possible in anyone of us.

"It also the case that for some reason, your kids might face a stressor that the family has not faced before. A stress-diathesis model predicts than then you might see a crack."

Which can happen in an adult as well. I believe the term use to be called "Going Postal".

All I am saying is that Guns are not any more dangerous then a lot of other things around your house. With proper training and knowledge your children will be as safe around them as any other power tool, Chain saw, electric outlet, baseball bat and any other dangerous thing they was taught to respect or use properly.

We seem to take on a mystical view of a firearm as some magic thing that has a will of it own and if you are not of a proper age or don't control it in a certain way it will hurt you. It is only a tool. If properly handled it is no more dangerous then a lot of other things you use everyday. In fact a lot less dangerous then some. I think it is time we, as gun owners and shooters, learn to think of them as what they are and not keep falling into the trap that the anti-gunner have backed us up into. Stop believing they are evil things that need to be locked and caged up constantly for the safety of the masses.

And learn to trust teenagers, for every bad one their are hundreds of good ones. Just because the news media and some of the medical profession makes them all out to be hominoid raging zombies with little free will does not mean they actually are. I have found them to be a lot less deceitful then a lot of adults.

Glenn....that last was not a stab at you personally. Please do not take it as such. I just don't buy into a lot of what comes out about kids that get into trouble being unbalanced or emotionally challenged when a lot of times it boils down to poor parenting, no family support, etc.

[Clinot]

Originally Posted by clt46910

...We seem to take on a mystical view of a firearm as some magic thing that has a will of it own and if you are not of a proper age or don't control it in a certain way it will hurt you. It is only a tool. If properly handled it is no more dangerous then a lot of other things you use everyday. In fact a lot less dangerous then some. I think it is time we, as gun owners and shooters, learn to think of them as what they are and not keep falling into the trap that the anti-gunner have backed us up into. Stop believing they are evil things that need to be locked and caged up constantly for the safety of the masses.

I agree with most of what you stated, but have to digress a bit on this one. Firearms ARE that mystical magical image. They represent power and authority to some, death and destruction to others, and tools of aggression or defense and hunting to another set of people.

Some of this is true, some of it is the portrayal they receive in the media (by media I mean all forms: The good gun with a gun, the bad guy with the gun, the solider with the gun, etc..)

Nonetheless, and the reason for my reply is that the reason I disagree with that is takes me back to a converstation with the wife many years ago about leaving a knife on the cutting board after the food was put away. We would argue over it, her point being that it was on the counter and that was that, and I pointing out that it was a dangerous thing to have out in the open -specifially that as I treated any TOOL, that tool should be put away until needed.

We eventually compromised (married men hear me: I won ) but only due to the fact that a few years later we had a toddler roaming about the house. And she saw my point of putting away tools, or locking away tools when not in use. I don't leave my drills where they lay at the end of the day because I'm done with them. Responsible tool ownership tells me that someones toe could be injured by my diamond tipped drillbit as they walk by my drill, or someone who doesn't know how to use my drillbit may come along a try to use it on a project that it is not designated for.

Point being it that you have to respect the tool for what the tool CAN do, and not what you think the tool SHOULD do. Because not everyone is going to subscibe to your logic or effort when it comes to the responsiblity of that tool. Not everyone without the proper background or life experiances can manage that tool.

The cars and guns in your example while vastly different each require a different set of training and responsibility. I trust my child but I still wont leave my garage door open with the keys in the car ignition hoping that they will understand the point stated or not that they should not be driving without the knowledge of how to or the license to do so.

Carry on!