this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Yeah, how about no?
IDK about where the person you are replying to is from, but I see it as a viable strategy in the US. There are too many stories of children playing with guns and killing someone. Teaching firearm safety and demystifying them is like teaching sex ed.
Not having firearms everywhere is a better answer, but I can only control so much.
Isn't it mostly kids playing with firearms in their own household?
Yup. A child in my school was killed passing around a found handgun with his friends. I don't remember the details, but if one of those kids had said something and left it might never have happened.
Not from the US, I have plenty of deadly stuff at home: cleaning products, solvents, medicines, sharps, electric stuff. The solution to that is fucking look after your children or don't have any, not give them a fucking gun when they are eight ffs.
Is it not possible to look after your child while teaching them about gun safety or something?
Or something what? I'd stick with keeping guns away from civilians of all ages.
True. I wouldn't hand my kids bb guns at 8. I'm also sure you don't hide dangerous items completely from your kids, and some way demonstrate using them responsibly.
I don't own any guns myself, so I used nerf rival guns to demonstrate safety to my children. Again, my biggest concerns are what to do with a found firearm, never point one at anything you don't want to shoot.
I also allowed them to hang out with Grandpa for an afternoon and familiarize themselves with firearms. If they were more interested in firearms, a bb gun would have been okay for them to take out to Grandpa's firing range. I'm only referring to a spring action device, and my children are a little older.
Completely. Not a drop of bleach within reach.
A really interesting video comparing gun law / cult in Switzerland and the USA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnBDK-QNZkM
Thanks for that. I think the US has lost its mind over guns, and the means are now the end.
It's part of our fear culture. We always have something to be afraid of, and providing guns is our security blanket.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=wnBDK-QNZkM
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The reality in the US is that guns are everywhere. People should be exposed to them early in a controlled environment. The kids who play with guns they find in a closet are usually the kids for whom guns are more mysterious.
Giving a kid their own gun (obviously they shouldn't have access to it without their parents) is a great way to demystify them. If they can ask their parents to show them a gun anytime then there's nothing special about them and the kids don't go hunting for them when parents aren't around.
And every adult should know how to safely handle a firearm even if they have no interest in owning one. Guns exist and you may need to secure one some day.
Guess I should be glad I don't live in that hellhole of a messed up country then. I wholeheartedly disagree with everything you said except the first sentence, so maybe we should just be glad we live on opposite sites of the planet.
That's the thing. You don't live here, so you can afford to be entirely ignorant about firearm safety.
If you lived here and thought nobody should learn about gun safety I'd call you wildly irresponsible.
Or maybe, just maybe, you should try and change the place you live in if it requires kids to be taught about gun safety.
What a bunch of crap, the kids who play with guns they find in a closet are usually the kids who find guns in a closet. simple as that.
So many sentences and anecdotes to describe "gun safety". You know what gun safety really is? Do not fucking keep a gun in a closet.
And if it is not you but grandpa who keeps them, Keep the children away from him. The sooner you all stop normalising this bullshit and do something about it, the sooner America will start moving away from schools shootings etc.
You can't be with your kid at all times in all places, and you can't always control their environment. Teaching them to be responsible around firearms in a place where they may come across them is important.
Simply telling them they're bad is no different than abstainance-only sex education.
Wtf is this comparison with sex this is the second time I see it in this thread sex doesn't kill you and I am not sure I want to know how you expose safely your kids to both firearms and...sex?!?
Maybe compare it with something else that is dangerous and you don't need to keep in your home. People might keep in their homes but as a parent you should try to be aware and make sure it doesn't happen. I don't know maybe hard drugs? So what do you do to prepare your kids to that, is simply telling them they are bad not enough? Do you make sure they are prepared and familiar to be around hard drugs?
It's like sex because it's something that they'll come across when they aren't with you. But unlike guns, sex isn't instantly deadly if done wrong. So teaching about sex can be more conceptual and when the time comes they can stumble their way through it until they figure it out.
With guns, they shouldn't go in blind because they'll kill themselves or someone else. So they should be taught how to safely handle and disarm a weapon.
So not like sex at all, and you don't handle it like sex at all either? Great comparison.
Now how about you look after your kids so they don't "stumble" upon a fucking gun, the same way you'd do with a crack pipe:
Please go ahead and teach kids about sex btw
The point is you can't control every environment a kid is exposed to. No gun will ever be accessible to a child in my house. Growing up, my Dad had guns, but he kept them secured and until I was an adult he didn't have ammunition in the house. He just bought it on the way to the range or the hunt.
But he didn't know what was at other houses. He also didn't always know where I was at. So he taught me about guns early and instilled responsibility around firearms as being paramount.
Simply teaching kids that guns are bad and nothing else has been proven to be ineffective in the same way that abstinence-only sex education and DARE are bad at preventing STDs and drug use. It's a failed approach because it doesn't remove the attraction brought on by the mystery.
And even though firearms in my family are kept in safes, if someone were to ask me if I had guns my answer would be "no." Public knowledge that I have guns in my house is a great way to attract a burglar.
Mate I think you just described the US' problem with guns, it's unwillingness to accept it has a problem, and it's stubbornness around you know how to handle it anyway.
Carry on, keep guns in your house, teach to your kids it's normal to have deadly weapons where someone lives and normalise the concept, accept they might stumble upon some and don't take responsibility for where your kids are or what they do.
The rest of the world has resolved this problem a long time ago but what would we know?
You can be 100% anti-gun and tell your kids to never touch a gun and ban them from visiting people who you know own guns, and they'll still be exposed to them.
There's more than 100 guns per square mile in the US. They're everywhere. If all firearms were made 100 percent illegal and the knowledge of how to make them was magically erased from the world there would still be tens of millions of them floating about centuries from now.
In that context, it's important to know about them regardless of how evil you, me, society, or anything else considers them to be.
If you live on a lake, you don't just tell kids they will drown if they go near the water. You teach them to fucking swim.
Make them illegal and centuries, CENTURIES! from now it would all be the same. Meanwhile Australia begs to differ, go and read about the port Arthur shooting. And yes the us has more guns per capita than Australia had, who cares start doing something about it.
If you live on an malaria infested swamp in 2023 you should consider moving somewhere else or petition you local politicians and talk with your mates about draining it. Teaching your kid to drink their own piss will only take them so far.
Australia really was amazing, I'll give you that.
Between 1990 and 2015 their homicide rate dropped by 50 percent.
And let's not forget England banning guns. Their homicide rate dropped by 20% in the same period.
Canada too - they put out some gun restrictions and theirs dropped by 29%.
How about Germany? Also 29%.
Meanwhile, the barbaric US's homicide rate... also halved.
The 90s were just relatively violent everywhere, and the drop in homicide rates isn't actually really correlated with firearm restrictions. There are people who will say that guns reduce homicides, but that doesn't really play out statistically either. In college I did an epidemiological analysis of homicides and other violent crime (US only data) and firearm legislation didn't have a statistically-significant impact in either direction from state to state looking at numbers between 1980 and 2015.
I found that anti-gun people and pro-gin people were both mad at me for "being on the other side" because it's become so fucking politicized that nobody wants to even look at data that doesn't jibe with the echo chamber.
There is a correlation between handguns and suicides -largely due to the effectiveness of the first attempt. Though oddly enough not in Australia, where taking the guns away just made people kill themselves in other ways:
Be me.
9 years old, over at my friend's house, his parents were out back in the yard.
My friend "want to see my dad's rifle?"
My other friend says sure, i follow.
Go to his parents closet, in the back is a bolt action hunting rifle. My friend picks it up and starts to point it.
I say "let me see that". Proceed to point it at the ground, open the chamber and make sure it was clear, then comment on how cool it was and pass it back.
Seemed common sense to me, but a lot of kids just don't know how to treat them.
Teaching your kids gun safety is like teaching them how to swim. You may never plan for them to be around guns, you may live in the middle of nebraska and never plan to go near water, but a little timeI spent teaching them can save lives.
So you have a story how some unsupervised, nine year old kids could just grab a firearm from a closet and you want to sell this as an argument about how your society's approach to handling guns is reasonable?
No. I want to say that teaching your kids how to safely handle a situation is good. Same way you teach them not to play in the road or go near the water without a life vest
You do what you want with your own kids.
How about no?
Then your children will grow up knowing nothing but school shootings. Education is the key.
You probably shouldn't be allowed around kids?
Um, maybe you shouldn't be a round kids?
You do know that laws are made specifically to limit what you are allowed to do to other people?
Well yes, but that doesn't cover essential things like gun safety
First of all, that's not what your previous comment was about. You said people could do whatever they want with their kids and they certainly can't.
Nonetheless: Second, gun safety isn't essential if there are no guns around. "But there are guns all over the USA!" Yes, which is one of the several reasons why I stay the fuck away from that shithole country.
Third, I sure hope that in a lot of countries, laws very well include regulations from which age onwards people are allowed to handle firearms, so yes, this topic is in fact covered.