Jackson Beard, director of training at Securité Gun Club in Woodinville, Wash., teaches introductory classes for kids as young as eight. The class includes the standard gun safety message for kids that the National Rifle Association has preached for decades with its “Eddie the Eagle” cartoons about what kids should do if they find a gun: stop, don’t touch, run away and tell a grown up.
But Beard says real gun safety education needs to go further and show kids — with their parents’ permission — how to fire a weapon.
“If we don’t teach our kids that, who will? And the answer is, no one,” he says. “And I would rather raise a responsible generation of gun owners than a generation of gun owners that has never been exposed to the safety message, the respect message, the message of how these guns are to be properly used.” …
Beard says the groups putting up those warnings (about being at least 18 on gun makers’ web sites) are “over-lawyered.”
“I have to take issue with the [idea] that education is somehow ‘marketing firearms to kids.’ It demonstrates a misunderstanding or even a irrational fear of firearms as tools,” he says.
— Martin Kaste in Amid Concerns About Kids and Guns, Some Say Training Is the Answer
One Response
Project Appleseed is an excellent example of a program that not only teaches firearms safety and shooting protocols, but also teaches civic responsibility. and patriotism.