Having THE talk with the kids

No, not that one about the birds and the bees, the one about firearm safety.

In the best of all worlds, every child would be exposed to gun safety from a very early age with refresher courses throughout their years. If adults have to have mandatory yearly classes on how to handle classified materials, then it makes sense that children will need refresher courses as well.

In my opinion, the best way to deal with firearms training for children starts with Eddie Eagle style instructions.

• Stop!
• Don’t Touch!
• Run Away
• Tell A Grown-up

Besides instructions on what to do if your child finds a gun, I also teach the four safety rules.

1. Treat every firearm as loaded until you have personally verified that it is unloaded
2. Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy, even if you have personally verified that it is unloaded
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot
4. Always identify your target, and what is beyond it

This is what I taught my children.

There was one other rule, if they ever wanted to see or handle one of my firearms I would stop what I was doing and bring the firearm to them. And we would then safely examine that firearm.

This last is designed to remove the curiosity part of firearms. If a firearm is something that is hidden in your sock drawer, you can darn well be sure that your kids have already found it. If it is a “secret” and “dirty” then it is the case that they will want to play with it.

Remove the temptation by giving them good instructions and guidance and then be willing to make removing their curiosity a priority for yourself.

When I got my pistol safe I had 2 of my own children living with me and 3 step children. I gathered all five of them and showed them the box. I then put a $50 bill in the box and put the box on the coffee table. I told them that if they could get the box open without damaging the pistol safe in the next 48 hours that the $50 would be theirs. They failed and I got to keep the money.

It also meant that they had no interest in trying to open the pistol safe, if they wanted to see anything in it, all they had to do is ask. And all they would be was frustrated if they just tried to open the safe.

While my children were younger and while my grandchild visited, all of my firearms were keep under lock and key. Since my youngest children are “old enough” and my grandchild doesn’t visit very often, like once every couple of years, I no longer have that always locked requirement.

This means that I can have some firearms out of the safes and displayed.

And then something weird happened, my son brought his girlfriend over.

And this lead to The Talk

I’m not particularly concerned about my son over at her house. He is anti-alcohol and anti-drugs, and firearm safe. Her parents are watchful so I really don’t have a concern.

On the other hand, she is now coming over here and I just put up a display stand for an Mrs. Pink, the AR-15 in our bedroom. Son and GF are put in our bedroom as it is downstairs where we can keep an eye on them for those pesky teenage hormone issues.

But that means she is in the same room as a rifle that is displayed.

So I took the two of them to the table and gave her The Talk. We went over the four firearm safety rules. We went over them until she could repeat them correctly.

I demonstrated that you can drop the magazine from a firearm and it is still loaded.

That first rule is so very difficult for most people. “Treat every gun as if it is loaded…” is hard. They “know” that it is unloaded. They just observed you unload it. You just showed them the empty chamber. Of course it is unloaded.

I broke my son of that by making my pistol go bang three times after he told me it was unloaded.

Once when he assumed I had brought it to the range unloaded, when it was hot.

The second was when I dropped the magazine and showed him all the cartridges in the mag.

The third was after the first two and I had shown him how to verify that a semi-automatic pistol was unloaded. I dropped the slide, asked him if it was loaded, he said it was unloaded. I pointed it down range and pulled the trigger to a bang.

I had cheated, thank you Lazarus Long, I had palmed a round into the chamber after he had verified that it was empty.

From that day forward he has always treated a firearm as being loaded.

It’s an awkward conversation, but you have to talk to other parents about guns, experts say is an okay article from CNN.

The problem is that it has just enough “off” that it makes it a hard read, and it has that leftist “I know better than you” attitude in it.

The author got her story from talking to Johanna Thomas, a member of Moms Demand. So you can expect it to go sideways from the start.

The first thing that Johanna does is to assume that she has the right to demand to know if the house her kid is visiting is gun free. This is because she has not trained her child to be safe around firearms. If her kid was trustworthy, then there wouldn’t be any issues as her kid isn’t going to pick up a firearm that they find.

Of course they have to have the irresponsible gun owner “The girls mother told [Johanna] that the family didn’t have any [guns] in the home but did have one in the car that was kept under a seat”.

Now I have had to put a firearm under the seat a couple of times. When there was nobody else in the vehicle, the vehicle was going to be locked and I had to go into a government mandated legal gun free zone. I know people that commonly place their carry weapon under the seat when they have to go into places that are gun unfriendly.

I don’t know any responsible gun owner that just leaves their gun rattling around loose under their seat.

I won’t give Everytown the link but they have a program that they call “S.M.A.R.T.”

• Secure all guns in your home and vehicles
• Model responsible behavior around guns
• Ask about the presence of unsecured guns in other homes
• Recognize the role of guns in suicide
• Tell your peers to be S.M.A.R.T

As always, the leftist has decided it is YOUR responsibility to keep her children safe. My firearms are secured. I believe that Everytown would have a cow because I don’t have all of my firearms disabled with ammunition in a separate secure storage container.

I do model responsible behavior around firearms.

And the only times I ask about other people’s firearms is in the context of “what cool guns can we shoot?”

The S.M.A.R.T. program is all about intruding into the lives of others and subtle painting all gun owners as dangerous.

Of course there has to be scare numbers “In a five year period leading up to 2021, there were 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18”. Hmm, that’s 414 unintentional shootings per year, on average. According to the CDC there were 53,220 deaths caused by conditions originating in the perinatal period, 27,734 accidental deaths, 8,526 assault(homicides), 8,472 suicides, 7,714 by malignant neoplasms, 3,585 by heart disease, 2,024 by influenza and pneumonia, 1,395 by Septicemia, 1,393 by cerebrovascular diseases, 1,156 by chronic lower respiratory diseases, 824 by in situ neoplasms.

And finally we have 765 by unintentional gun shoot. Note that the “unintentional gun shoot” is reported out of Everytown, not from the CDC.

All of this means that there are many many more issues that lead to childhood deaths and injuries other than “unsecured firearms”.

The problem really is that every such unintentional death by gun of a child is horrific. As it is almost always preventable.

One of the common themes going through the gun rights infringement community is to treat firearm related violence as a health issue. We find many direct allegations of this. From people claiming we have an epidemic of “gun[related]-violence” to having the CDC study it as a health issue.

Language also plays a part in it.

Talking about gun safety when it comes to your kids and community doesn’t need to be a political issue, said Cassandra Crifasi, associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. It may feel uncomfortable, but the focus can stay on minimizing the risk of exposure.

Somehow there is a gun right infringement group at Johns Hopkins, a world renowned medical school, labeled “Bloomberg School of Public Health”. They talk about “minimizing the risk of exposure.” I’m very sorry, but I’ve never seen anybody die because they were “exposed” to a gun.

Then she goes and blows my mind by saying this:

“We can protect kids, we can reduce a lot of gun violence, just by normalizing the conversation around firearms,” Thomas said.

Then I realized that “normalizing the conversation around firearms” means her people getting to lecture us about how we should store our firearms. For them, guns should always be stored in a locked safe and unloaded. By that they mean with no loaded magazines as well.

As an aside, the State of Maryland considers a magazine with one round in it to be a “loaded firearm”.

Johanna then gives some manipulative language to use to get other parents to divulge if they have firearms. She makes it clear that the only way she thinks it is safe to store a firearm is in a locked safe, unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate safe.

Yeah, just what you want to do when you hear an animal in your house (or on your porch), go to the rifle safe, unlock the safe, pull out the rifle, close and lock the safe, go to the ammo safe, unlock it. Take out a box of ammo, put rounds in to the magazine, ready your firearm and proceed.

No, I think I’ll use different methods.

Listen to J.Kb. talk about actually securing firearms. He has written a number of very good articles. Upto and including anchoring a job box to the floor of the garage and then storing firearms in that.

Of course we get to the final line:

In order for my child to come to your house, do you have a way you can secure those firearms that would be unloaded and locked in a safe?

“Do it my way or I will destroy your child’s friendship with my child.”