Gun Safety for Families

In this article:
Teaching Gun Safety
Is Instruction Enough?
If You Own a Gun
If You Don't Own a Gun
National ASK Day
"Toys" that Can Hurt
For More Information

Guns can be dangerous—and sometimes fatal—in the hands of kids. Whether parents own guns or not, they must proactively address issues of gun safety with their children.

Guns and children can be a harmful if not fatal combination. Regardless of our views on gun control, we need to face the fact that guns are a part of American society. Whether parents own guns or not, they must proactively address issues of gun safety with their children to help them protect themselves from injury, death, or even having to live with accidentally shooting another person.

Teaching Gun Safety

When should parents address the issue of guns with their kids? The National Rifle Association (NRA) recommends that parents begin teaching gun safety to a child "the first time he or she shows an interest in firearms, even toy pistols or rifles."

Nancy Brown, an education specialist with the Knox County Sheriff's Office in Knoxville, Tennessee, teaches gun safety to children and parents through the schools. "If you own guns in your home, you should start when children can understand enough to know that they cannot touch that gun," she says. "There have been gun accidents when a child at a very young age has got hold of a gun."

When teaching about gun safety, parents may wish to use information from NRA's widely popular Eddie Eagle GunSafe® Program. The program, begun in 1998, was developed with input from clinical psychologists, reading specialists, teachers, curriculum specialists, urban housing safety officials, and law enforcement personnel and is taught to preschoolers through third graders across the country. Eddie Eagle does not use firearms in its program, make value judgments about guns, or mention the NRA, and it has no political agenda—it exists solely to promote the safety of children.

The program teaches four important steps children should follow if they find or are shown a gun:

• STOP!
• Don't Touch the Gun
• Leave the Area
• Tell an Adult

Keep in mind that a one-time lesson on gun safety is not enough; parents need to reinforce these basic rules with kids. "Because isolated lessons and concepts can be quickly forgotten, repetition will help children remember standard safety procedures," says the NRA.

Brown also recommends that parents talk to their kids about guns they see on television or in video games. Emphasize that although animated characters often recover quickly from a gunshot wound, this is not real—real guns shoot actual bullets that can drive themselves into another person's body and hurt or kill them.

Is Instruction Enough?

While nobody will argue the importance of teaching gun safety, the lessons are no guarantee that a child will respond appropriately if he or she finds a gun. A number of studies suggest that even children who are taught not to touch guns can't resist their natural curiosity, and that parents may have unrealistic expectations about their kids' behavior around firearms. One study, called "Seeing Is Believing: What Do Boys Do When They Find a Real Gun?" and published in the June 2001 journal Pediatrics, showed that many preteen boys will handle a gun and even pull the trigger if they find one.

Physicians studied 64 boys ages 8 to 12 with a mean age of 9.8 years. Following informed parental consent, pairs or trios of boys were placed in a room in a hospital and observed through a one-way mirror for up to 15 minutes. Two toy water pistols and one actual handgun (altered so it could not fire) were hidden in drawers, and the firearm was rigged with a concealed transmitter that monitored whether the trigger was depressed hard enough to fire the gun. Seventy-two percent of the kids discovered the gun in the drawer, and of those that found the gun, 76 percent handled it. In nearly half of the groups studied, one or more boys pulled the trigger. Of the children in the study, more than 90 percent said they had previously received gun safety instruction.

Gun lobby groups argued limitations of the study, including using the hospital—likely thought of as a safe environment by the boys—for the study location. Researchers acknowledged this limitation yet added that children might think guns in the home are also in "safe environments," and that their findings show that it is not enough to simply teach children about guns.