Children and Guns
From NPR:
The shooting death of a 2-year-old girl in Kentucky at the hands of her 5-year-old brother has opened up yet another debate about gun control.
While no one favors the idea of 5-year-olds using weapons without supervision, there is no consensus on the appropriate age to start hands-on training with firearms.
“Many people who have firearms familiarize their kids with firearms early on, because they want them to know that this is not something to be trifled with,” says Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, a gun rights advocacy group.
But while some hunters and other gun owners want to instill in their kids a sense of heritage and a healthy respect for safety, public health advocates believe there’s little benefit in allowing any children to handle guns.
The American Academy of Pediatrics states bluntly in a policy statement that the best way to prevent firearm injury is to keep guns out of children’s homes and communities.
“In terms of safety, why would you want these kids around incredibly dangerous products?” says David Hemenway, director of Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center. “It’s hard to imagine how this increases safety at all — let’s play with a dangerous product.”
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OK, that’s NPR. But isn’t there an argument for teaching gun safety to children? What do studies show?
Well, there are no studies that have any meaning, nor could there ever be. You’d need large, statistically valid samples of kids in virtually the same environment, some of which were introduced to guns, and some of which weren’t. Then you’d need to track the progress of all these kids vis-a-vis gun usage as they grow into and through adulthood.
The real kicker here is “in virtually the same environment”; that, in and of itself, doesn’t exist. The home environment that features parents who encourage their kids to handle deadly weapons bears little resemblance to the family culture in which most of us grew up.
We need to realize how grossly anomalous America is with respect to the issue of guns generally, even among countries that have no laws banning them. Any adult in Japan can own a gun, but the process looks nothing like it does here, i.e., walking into a gun store and walking out with enough fire power to blow away everyone in a school, theater, or grocery store. The candidate must submit a reason for gun ownership, pass a background check that includes mental health, allow a waiting period to pass, register the weapon, and pass a gun safety course.
Our firearm death rate per 100,000 people is more than 600 times theirs.
