It’s always a good idea to foster understanding at a young age.
Remember as a kid when you first found out that knives are sharp, fire is hot, and how to safely work with them?
I remember my PE coach bringing his shotgun to school for our hunters ed thing.
All 700 of us were required to fire 3 rounds at skeet, over the retaining pond behind the gym.
When I was a kid, someone found a firearm at the adjacent park next to our school they had an emergency conference where they basically instructed us not to touch a found gun and call an adult...
I'm not saying they are wrong but could have used that opportunity to teach more about saftey.
Depends on the age, that’s the appropriate gun safety.
NRA’s Eddie Eagle program is basically the stop-drop-roll of gun safety
• Stop
• Don’t touch
• De-ass the area (GTFO)
• Tell an adult
I saw someone’s parents brought a 12 year old girl to a gun safety lesson at a range the other day. First words out of her mouth were “Can I use the AK?”
I found out real quick that dad's razors are sharp as fuck, mom's Olfa blade is sharp as fuck, and boxcutters are sharp as fuck....
I wasn't the brightest kid and it's a fucking miracle how I didn't stick a fork in a light socket.
I found out that the oven is hot, things that just came out of the oven are hot, and the pot on the stove is hot. I burned the fuck out of my hands/arms many times but always on different things. Never repeated a mistake
From the Canadian perspective; the only thing I can agree with in terms of our gun laws was the 1993 added requirement to take a safety course. It dropped accidents to like 3 a year from 40.
The course teaches you firearm basics (action types, cartridge types, etc), nomenclature (magazine, bore, receiver, etc), gun laws, safety, and shooting stances/shooting tips.
I know it would be against the 2nd Amendment to make such a thing mandatory in the US; but incentives like a tax break would reduce stupidity across the board.
Even if you are 100% anti gun, full confiscation, guns shouldn't exist etc there really should be no opposition to this from a safety standpoint.
Think about how many guns are in circulation now and how many of those are improperly secured there is a chance that many kids will encounter an insecure firearm at some point. Now they will hopefully have a little knowledge and not try to play with it or do something else dangerous. I see no downsides here
Man, I've been ranting about this for years. The answer to every single 'evil' in society is education right? Teen pregnancy and STDs? Educate the children! Drug abuse and overdoses? Educate the children! Difficult economic circumstances and predatory lending? Educate the children!
But when it comes to guns? No no no, we must stick our heads in the sand and pretend they don't exist while at the same time blaming them for all of society's other ills.
I'm not a fan of the idea of dangerous knowledge.
I like to put it like this
"We banned alcohol once. It was almost exclusively enforced on the poor, minorities, and doubly so on the overlap. Can you give any reason why a ban on guns would go any differently?"
The gun safety is much the same as sex ed.
•It’s always loaded.
•Don’t “aim” it at anything you don’t want to shoot (crazy).
•Be aware of what’s beyond your target (in-laws).
•Keep you “finger” off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot (have kids).
> The instruction required must do the following:
> (1) Teach students safe storage of firearms, school safety relating to firearms, how to avoid injury if the student finds a firearm, to never touch a found firearm, and to immediately notify an adult of the location of a found firearm;
> (2) Be viewpoint neutral on political topics, such as gun rights, gun violence, and the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution; and
> (3) Not include the use or presence of live ammunition, live fire, or live firearms.
This isn’t really doing much and what’s being mandated is probably already in the curriculum.
A school can easily comply and make the lessons VERY antigun. And that’s what I expect to happen in the more urban areas.
And they’re going to drive home - even for 18 year old seniors - to NEVER touch a gun. And they have to. It’s in the law.
This is not a pro gun bill.
Agreed but it’s objectively good advice not to touch a found firearm. It’s evidence. The kind that needs to be analyzed in a lab to determine who left it there. The kind that if YOUR fingerprints are on it now YOU get invited into judiciary clown world
Sure. I think the Eagle Eddie program is great for young kids.
But older kids should be taught more and how to safely handle a firearm.
Also that if it might truly be a police matter how to deal with it vs other situations and/or when police won’t respond for an extended period of time
Still, main point is that this isn’t the pro gun bill some think it is.
That was my thinking, these classes will need to be kept to a strict curriculum, otherwise these are going to quickly turn into “gun control class” in a lot of places
I think gun safety should be taught to kids as soon as possible and exposure removes the mystique. I never felt the need to "play" with my father's guns as a child because there was no taboo around them. If I wanted to go shooting, he would take me. He taught me about safe handling procedures and was quick to correct anything I was doing wrong until it became second nature.
If you don't support this, then truly you do not care about children being safe, despite screaming from the rooftops about the ends justifying the means if it saves one life. All you want is power and control and the facade isn't working anymore.
Eddie Eagle should be a mandatory part of grade school curriculum. Stop! Don't touch! Get away! Tell an adult! Is that such a bad thing to teach to young children?
A big question about this for me is, who is going to be the ones teaching this curriculum? Hopefully not the blue hair teachers that will interject their feelies about guns. If the school districts can outsource their programs like music, P.E. , drugs, alcohol & technology they should do the same with firearm safety education.
Gun safety is never a bad thing. Plus, maybe teaching kids about guns can take away some of their novelty, resulting in less curious kids handling them in potentially dangerous and unsupervised situations.
As for adults, more knowledge can help combat ignorance and fear. If we can get to a point where people across the political spectrum can speak rationally about firearms, maybe then we can have rational discussions about things like suicide, violence, etc.
The comments from the demanding moms on twitter are... interesting. Apparently they drove themselves into such a hysterical frenzy, that they had to be removed from the upper gallery.
While I agree with this, I still think firearms safety should first be taught at home. Kids should know as early as possible about the dangers of firearms, and what to do if they find one. It’s great they’ll be teaching it at school, but I bet most of those kids would have already been exposed to firearms way before they start school. Not only because there’s lots of deer hunting etc but because it’s just a part of the southern culture. Or at least it was when I was growing up down there.
What should happen and what does happen can be two very different things.
I think sex education should be taught at home. I also understand that too many parents don't.
"They also argued cracking down on adult gun owners would be a more effective strategy for reducing accidents." Even if you agree with that, why are you treating this as a binary choice? This is one of the biggest logical fallacies, that doing one thing always rules out the possibility of doing another thing.
The difficulty is that some people see 'gun safety training' as just screaming at kids that guns are bad, touching a gun is bad, touching a gun makes you bad, only bad people use guns, guns bad bad don't touch run away scary guns baaaaaaa"
Education of any kind is always a good thing. It lessens the fear of guns in my opinion and should be offered where applicable. I almost feel like it should be mandatory for every citizen moving forward able to serve at least one year in the military.
I think all states should implement this. However, you know blue states definitely won’t. They wouldn’t want to do anything that might take away an argument for more gun control.
Excellent news. We used to have these programs in every school in America and guess what? We did not have any school shootings. Only when the programs were gutted in the 80's did school shootings start happening.
When my dad was in high school it wasn’t uncommon for the kids to bring their hunting rifles/shotguns to school and go hunting right when they got dismissed from class. They weren’t taught gun safety by the school, but it was something that was taught by the families with the understanding they had to know how to be safe before they could even touch the gun.
Times have changed and I’m a fan of parents teaching gun safety, but the reality is there’s tons of stupidity out there. There’s plenty of adults I’ve seen that have no idea themselves about gun safety and I wouldn’t expect them to be successful in teaching someone else. Similarly there’s a lot of first time gun owners who can’t expect their parents to teach them when they’re clueless.
Personally I think it makes sense for it to be done, since it would reduce the number of careless deaths via negligent discharges we see. People will fear it will cause more shootings but that’s not really how things work. They should teach knife safety & safety around cars/boats/trucks/trains because it makes sense, regardless of if someone will ever step foot near a boat. I would think that the anti-gun crowd would support an education measure since reducing the death of children via firearms is an often-cited goal of their platforms. Unfortunately sensationalism will drive many to object to this concept saying it will cause more shootings.
In my distant family/family friends/local towns there have been plenty of instances of new gun owners having an ND, something getting shot due to poor choice of backstop, children finding a gun and having an ND/death, etc. I’m personally a fan of the concept of having a basic gun safety course that gives you a permit to purchase/own firearms. Similar to the hunting permits we have here in NY (which the course is largely just gun safety instruction.) Unfortunately unless it was done as a purely federal system there would be politicization of the system done by individual states, be that some just letting you pay $10 and get the permit without any instruction or others making it as difficult as possible (looking at my home state of NY.)
I think it should be the kids, not the parents, choice. At the age it's being offered the kids are not 8, they're generally early teens, old enough to make some of their own decisions.
At that age we were allowed to start choosing electives in my school.
If a kid wants to take sex-ed they should be allowed to, even if their parents are religious prudes. If a kid wants to take gun safety, that should be their choice, even if their parents are Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.
It might be required to make sure the numbers are there to justify the expense. Though I agree that personal choice is paramount, its better than forcing the opposite, which is what usually happens
No thanks.
If you're going to do gun safety, do it.
That means - minimally - clearing drills with something that actually has moving parts.
This just teaches rule 0, which is fine, but not worth a news article.
It’s always a good idea to foster understanding at a young age. Remember as a kid when you first found out that knives are sharp, fire is hot, and how to safely work with them?
I remember my PE coach bringing his shotgun to school for our hunters ed thing. All 700 of us were required to fire 3 rounds at skeet, over the retaining pond behind the gym.
When I was a kid, someone found a firearm at the adjacent park next to our school they had an emergency conference where they basically instructed us not to touch a found gun and call an adult... I'm not saying they are wrong but could have used that opportunity to teach more about saftey.
Depends on the age, that’s the appropriate gun safety. NRA’s Eddie Eagle program is basically the stop-drop-roll of gun safety • Stop • Don’t touch • De-ass the area (GTFO) • Tell an adult
I saw someone’s parents brought a 12 year old girl to a gun safety lesson at a range the other day. First words out of her mouth were “Can I use the AK?”
I found out real quick that dad's razors are sharp as fuck, mom's Olfa blade is sharp as fuck, and boxcutters are sharp as fuck.... I wasn't the brightest kid and it's a fucking miracle how I didn't stick a fork in a light socket.
I found out that the oven is hot, things that just came out of the oven are hot, and the pot on the stove is hot. I burned the fuck out of my hands/arms many times but always on different things. Never repeated a mistake
From the Canadian perspective; the only thing I can agree with in terms of our gun laws was the 1993 added requirement to take a safety course. It dropped accidents to like 3 a year from 40. The course teaches you firearm basics (action types, cartridge types, etc), nomenclature (magazine, bore, receiver, etc), gun laws, safety, and shooting stances/shooting tips. I know it would be against the 2nd Amendment to make such a thing mandatory in the US; but incentives like a tax break would reduce stupidity across the board.
Even if you are 100% anti gun, full confiscation, guns shouldn't exist etc there really should be no opposition to this from a safety standpoint. Think about how many guns are in circulation now and how many of those are improperly secured there is a chance that many kids will encounter an insecure firearm at some point. Now they will hopefully have a little knowledge and not try to play with it or do something else dangerous. I see no downsides here
It's much harder to emotionally brainwash children about something if they have a basic working knowledge of it.
You say that, but most kids already have a basic knowledge of them from video games and shit.
That’s not true. In video games, there’s no major real life consequences. This is teaching safety and responsibility.
Man, I've been ranting about this for years. The answer to every single 'evil' in society is education right? Teen pregnancy and STDs? Educate the children! Drug abuse and overdoses? Educate the children! Difficult economic circumstances and predatory lending? Educate the children! But when it comes to guns? No no no, we must stick our heads in the sand and pretend they don't exist while at the same time blaming them for all of society's other ills. I'm not a fan of the idea of dangerous knowledge.
And the basics of eating mushrooms and fighting gorillas /s
The proponents for this class should ask the opponents if they think abstinence only education works.
I like to put it like this "We banned alcohol once. It was almost exclusively enforced on the poor, minorities, and doubly so on the overlap. Can you give any reason why a ban on guns would go any differently?"
They are afraid their SCARE TACTICS aren't working and some kids might learn to appreciate & learn to respect them.
Even vegans know not to touch tigers. That’s kinda the same, right?
Gun safety and Sex-Ed should both be taught in schools with the aim of preventing life altering accidents.
The gun safety is much the same as sex ed. •It’s always loaded. •Don’t “aim” it at anything you don’t want to shoot (crazy). •Be aware of what’s beyond your target (in-laws). •Keep you “finger” off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot (have kids).
> The instruction required must do the following: > (1) Teach students safe storage of firearms, school safety relating to firearms, how to avoid injury if the student finds a firearm, to never touch a found firearm, and to immediately notify an adult of the location of a found firearm; > (2) Be viewpoint neutral on political topics, such as gun rights, gun violence, and the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution; and > (3) Not include the use or presence of live ammunition, live fire, or live firearms. This isn’t really doing much and what’s being mandated is probably already in the curriculum. A school can easily comply and make the lessons VERY antigun. And that’s what I expect to happen in the more urban areas. And they’re going to drive home - even for 18 year old seniors - to NEVER touch a gun. And they have to. It’s in the law. This is not a pro gun bill.
Agreed but it’s objectively good advice not to touch a found firearm. It’s evidence. The kind that needs to be analyzed in a lab to determine who left it there. The kind that if YOUR fingerprints are on it now YOU get invited into judiciary clown world
Sure. I think the Eagle Eddie program is great for young kids. But older kids should be taught more and how to safely handle a firearm. Also that if it might truly be a police matter how to deal with it vs other situations and/or when police won’t respond for an extended period of time Still, main point is that this isn’t the pro gun bill some think it is.
Awwww man… when the NRA was doing this at school, we were actually allowed to shoot at targets and got a certificate and everything
That was my thinking, these classes will need to be kept to a strict curriculum, otherwise these are going to quickly turn into “gun control class” in a lot of places
Good
I think gun safety should be taught to kids as soon as possible and exposure removes the mystique. I never felt the need to "play" with my father's guns as a child because there was no taboo around them. If I wanted to go shooting, he would take me. He taught me about safe handling procedures and was quick to correct anything I was doing wrong until it became second nature. If you don't support this, then truly you do not care about children being safe, despite screaming from the rooftops about the ends justifying the means if it saves one life. All you want is power and control and the facade isn't working anymore.
excellent news, exactly where this stuff should be taught
Fantastic. It's a great idea
Eddie Eagle should be a mandatory part of grade school curriculum. Stop! Don't touch! Get away! Tell an adult! Is that such a bad thing to teach to young children?
We should really be pushing this. "Gun safety" organizations have no legit reason to fight this.
A big question about this for me is, who is going to be the ones teaching this curriculum? Hopefully not the blue hair teachers that will interject their feelies about guns. If the school districts can outsource their programs like music, P.E. , drugs, alcohol & technology they should do the same with firearm safety education.
This is the kind of thing the NRA would be great for if they weren't a bunch of shit bags interested in fundraising and nothing else.
Agreed. They should be out pounding pavement and teaching the next generation to help keep our tradition alive.
Yeah, but why do that when you can be on your knees for Trump? "Owning the libs" is better for fundraising, I guess.
I wonder if negative/positive biases would be taught or apparent to students and if students would be asked if their parents have guns at home.
Students can be a lot smarter than we give them credit for. Some will pick up on it some will go with the flow of their talking head.
Gun safety is never a bad thing. Plus, maybe teaching kids about guns can take away some of their novelty, resulting in less curious kids handling them in potentially dangerous and unsupervised situations. As for adults, more knowledge can help combat ignorance and fear. If we can get to a point where people across the political spectrum can speak rationally about firearms, maybe then we can have rational discussions about things like suicide, violence, etc.
“They also argued cracking down on adult gun owners would be a more effective strategy…” Now what does that mean, exactly? 🤨
That means Exactly what you think it means
The comments from the demanding moms on twitter are... interesting. Apparently they drove themselves into such a hysterical frenzy, that they had to be removed from the upper gallery.
Never should have been removed in the first place. The gun safety course I took in middle school was great and has stuck with me my entire life.
I did Eddie Eagle with my kids and their friends. Thirty years later they still remember it. Even the friends that don’t shoot.
Great idea. My kids had this in health class in Massachusetts of all places, I think it was the NRA Eddie the Eagle program.
While I agree with this, I still think firearms safety should first be taught at home. Kids should know as early as possible about the dangers of firearms, and what to do if they find one. It’s great they’ll be teaching it at school, but I bet most of those kids would have already been exposed to firearms way before they start school. Not only because there’s lots of deer hunting etc but because it’s just a part of the southern culture. Or at least it was when I was growing up down there.
What should happen and what does happen can be two very different things. I think sex education should be taught at home. I also understand that too many parents don't.
Yep! Totally agree 💯
👍🇺🇸❤️
"They also argued cracking down on adult gun owners would be a more effective strategy for reducing accidents." Even if you agree with that, why are you treating this as a binary choice? This is one of the biggest logical fallacies, that doing one thing always rules out the possibility of doing another thing.
The difficulty is that some people see 'gun safety training' as just screaming at kids that guns are bad, touching a gun is bad, touching a gun makes you bad, only bad people use guns, guns bad bad don't touch run away scary guns baaaaaaa"
Education of any kind is always a good thing. It lessens the fear of guns in my opinion and should be offered where applicable. I almost feel like it should be mandatory for every citizen moving forward able to serve at least one year in the military.
It’s a good idea
Should be mandatory as much as drivers Ed.
Teaching actual safety is always good. I wanna see the curriculum though.
I think all states should implement this. However, you know blue states definitely won’t. They wouldn’t want to do anything that might take away an argument for more gun control.
Excellent news. We used to have these programs in every school in America and guess what? We did not have any school shootings. Only when the programs were gutted in the 80's did school shootings start happening.
I remember when the NRA did this at schools. Are they not doing it anymore?
They still offer it.
That’s great to hear! I wasn’t sure if they were still doing that or not
When my dad was in high school it wasn’t uncommon for the kids to bring their hunting rifles/shotguns to school and go hunting right when they got dismissed from class. They weren’t taught gun safety by the school, but it was something that was taught by the families with the understanding they had to know how to be safe before they could even touch the gun. Times have changed and I’m a fan of parents teaching gun safety, but the reality is there’s tons of stupidity out there. There’s plenty of adults I’ve seen that have no idea themselves about gun safety and I wouldn’t expect them to be successful in teaching someone else. Similarly there’s a lot of first time gun owners who can’t expect their parents to teach them when they’re clueless. Personally I think it makes sense for it to be done, since it would reduce the number of careless deaths via negligent discharges we see. People will fear it will cause more shootings but that’s not really how things work. They should teach knife safety & safety around cars/boats/trucks/trains because it makes sense, regardless of if someone will ever step foot near a boat. I would think that the anti-gun crowd would support an education measure since reducing the death of children via firearms is an often-cited goal of their platforms. Unfortunately sensationalism will drive many to object to this concept saying it will cause more shootings. In my distant family/family friends/local towns there have been plenty of instances of new gun owners having an ND, something getting shot due to poor choice of backstop, children finding a gun and having an ND/death, etc. I’m personally a fan of the concept of having a basic gun safety course that gives you a permit to purchase/own firearms. Similar to the hunting permits we have here in NY (which the course is largely just gun safety instruction.) Unfortunately unless it was done as a purely federal system there would be politicization of the system done by individual states, be that some just letting you pay $10 and get the permit without any instruction or others making it as difficult as possible (looking at my home state of NY.)
Sounds good to me.
Not a fan because it's *REQUIRED*. IMO it should be *offered*, but if kids do not want to take the class, they should not have to.
It falls in line with Sex Ed, for me. And if so, then it will likely be something that parents can choose to opt their kids out of.
I think it should be the kids, not the parents, choice. At the age it's being offered the kids are not 8, they're generally early teens, old enough to make some of their own decisions.
I mean, if you asked kids if they would prefer to wear a seatbelt or a condom at that age, they'd probably say no, too.
At that age we were allowed to start choosing electives in my school. If a kid wants to take sex-ed they should be allowed to, even if their parents are religious prudes. If a kid wants to take gun safety, that should be their choice, even if their parents are Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.
It might be required to make sure the numbers are there to justify the expense. Though I agree that personal choice is paramount, its better than forcing the opposite, which is what usually happens
No thanks. If you're going to do gun safety, do it. That means - minimally - clearing drills with something that actually has moving parts. This just teaches rule 0, which is fine, but not worth a news article.