Kids and Guns
Safety through education and cultural indoctrination
Some things to consider should you decide to use some of the following strategies.
1. You must be competent with your firearms in regards to safety as well as weapons handling. You cannot teach what you don't know.
2. When staging your weapons around the house, there must be a gross motor skill required to chamber a round. Meaning if it’s a rifle, you have a magazine seated but have to run the charging handle to chamber a round. If it's a pistol, you can have a loaded magazine in the grip but have to rack the slide to chamber a round.
3. This methodology requires understanding the personalities of your children. Not all children will want to share the hobby or take any interest at all. If this is the case, I believe they should still have a basic understanding of how a firearm works and the four safety rules.
4. This is a process. If your kids are older and don't have any experience with guns, then you have to use your discretion and determine if they are mature enough to behave appropriately around firearms when you aren't around. I wouldn't suggest that you start leaving your guns around the house one day without first educating them and making sure they understand the responsibility firearms require.
With that out of the way, let's get to the philosophy. Being a father of three rarely doesn't bleed into other areas of my life. It's hard to think of one passion or hobby that my role as a father hasn't influenced, and being a second amendment advocate isn't any different. If you ask almost anyone about raising kids around firearms, their answers usually range from "I warn them that if they touch it, I'll beat their *ss" to "your kids have a higher percentage chance of dying from gun violence just because you have that in your house." When asked, the gun community will revert to the antiquated NRA education that says things like "store your gun unloaded with the ammunition away from the firearm."
I will be the first to tell you that no one has a say in how you raise your kids. I only aim to share some of my thoughts and experiences in raising my three children immersed within second amendment culture and dive a little deeper into a topic where I think we are failing as a community. My home defense tools are not locked up and not stored away from the ammunition. I do not limit the defense of my family by keeping my guns inaccessible, and I trust my children around them. So how have my children not shot my wife and I in our sleep? How am I not raining down corporal punishment every other minute as they are clamoring to touch the forbidden tool? I refuse to make it taboo. Since they first began to take an interest in my guns, I have always granted them access. The rule is: you can always touch when you ask. When they ask, I always take the time with them to explore whatever firearm has caught their attention. Directly by their side, I reinforce the four basic firearm safety rules, the operation of the guns we have in the house, how to perform a safety check, and how to field-strip them. I teach them the value of individual gun ownership and what their responsibility will be in the future. I regularly take them shooting and reinforce the firearm safety rules. I've taught them how to shoot better than the fudd next door at the range. We started small, with guns that were manageable with tiny hands and no experience. I made it a mix between fun and educational. In the future, my kids will be an integral part of our home defense plan. They will keep a firearm in their room, with shared responsibilities in planning and defense.
" you can't educate curiosity out of a child."
One of any parent's nightmares is your child coming into possession of a firearm without you there and having an accident. In 2016 there were 3,143 firearms-related deaths amongst children under the age of 19. In 2020, Dianne Sawer headed a special where they created an experiment on children in grade school. Their parents had already told the children that guns are off-limits. They then showed them the NRA cartoon Eddie Eagle who says: "Stop, don't touch, leave the area, tell an adult," then finally reinforced that point with a police officer. They then left the kids alone in a room with guns stashed in their toys and watched to see if the kids would follow Eddie Eagle's rules and call an adult for help. I'm sure you know what happened; the kids touched the guns, even played with them, even picked them up and looked down the barrel. The child psychologist overseeing the observation said it best when she stated, " you can't educate curiosity out of a child." I agree you can not educate the curiosity out of a child, but you can familiarize the child with guns to the point they are no longer curious. Do kids have an unwavering curiosity for pliers? Wrenches? Maybe at first, before they explore them, but after they just become another inanimate object in the house because they're not off-limits, not forbidden. Guns can be the same way if you work at it. Desensitization works the same way with kids as it does with us. The more we see something, the less it stands out and draws our attention. I genuinely believe that if those of us within the firearms community worked harder to educate our children, not only will we positively affect culture, but we would drastically reduce the number of child accident deaths by firearms every year.
If we take the time to invest now, it will pay dividends in the future of firearms politics in America. If you haven't noticed, we are in a culture war. The firearms community has been for a while. We were the first to get censored on social media, the first to get payment processors shut down, and the first to be openly demonized in mainstream media. We are currently seeing a lazy community's after-effects letting poorly misinformed politicians and a corrupt advocacy group speak for us for decades. Not only that, but the community isn't doing its job inside their own homes and passing the knowledge and tradition of firearms on to the next generation. It's honestly no surprise we are fighting for our lives regarding federal legislation and carrying an extremely negative cultural stigma. There's a ton of things you can do outside your house to be a soldier in the culture war, but I will cover that in a future post. This is about what we can do in our own homes.
It has taken since the early 1900s for the state to push us so far back on our heels, to the point where we are fighting for things like pistol brace legality instead of fighting to abolish the NFA. We have allowed the Overton window to shift so far. We have lost sight as a community of what liberty actually looks like. So what can you do today, right now? Educate your children. Normalize guns, kit, suppressors, night vision, etc., with the next generation. Normalize training. Normalize self-sufficiency. It starts with us, starting with them. Teach them the value of the second amendment, and teach them how to fight for it. Teach them how to articulate the importance of protecting our natural right to self-defense. Make protecting yourself and your family normal. Make it expected. It will take time, generations even before we see the changes we want to see, so we have to start now. It's time to get to work.
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