Opponent of Gun Safety Classes for Kids Gets It All Wrong

An Arizona bill making its way through the legislature this session would require K-12 schools to provide “age-appropriate firearm safety awareness education” to students each year. You can read the criteria for the lessons here, but it’s safe to say that it’s not meant to be any kind of backdoor indoctrination to gun ownership or anti-gun activism. The goal is simple: to make kids and juveniles aware of what to do if they come across a firearm.  

Bruce Petillo doesn’t see it that way, though. As he wrote in the Arizona Republic, in his view it “uts kids in charge of their own safety” while absolving gun-owning adults of any responsibility in storing their firearms safely. 

On the surface, teaching children what to do if they encounter a firearm may sound reasonable. But when we move beyond intuition and examine the data, a different picture emerges. There is strong evidence that safe storage saves lives. But classroom gun education has not been found to be successful at keeping kids from playing with unsecured guns. That distinction matters.

The last link provided by Petillo is to a Rutgers University press release about a study that purportedly found kids exposed to a variety of gun safety programs “often ignore what they learned when encountering a real firearm.”

There are some limitations with that, though. As the press release notes, there’s a dearth of research on gun safety programs after the 4th grade. And the study found that some programs are effective at keeping kids from touching found firearms, at least in the short term. That suggests that periodic reinforcement of these lessons can save lives. 

Most importantly, this education doesn’t have to replace educating adults about the dangers of keeping kids away from firearms without adult supervision. More educational for all is the answer, not keeping kids ignorant of what to do if they see a gun and instituting a one size-fits-all storage mandate for gun owners that punishes parents and guardians after a tragedy has taken place. 

And Petillo does know tragedy. The reason why this issue is so important to him is because his son was killed by a friend who picked up a gun he thought was unloaded. 

In 2021, I lost my 15-year-old son, Christian, at what should have been one of the safest places imaginable—a sleepover at a friend’s house. At some point during the night, another boy in the home accessed one of the family’s firearms and brought it out. The gun was loaded. That boy had been around guns and had been taught about them. And in that moment, none of that training mattered.

According to the boy’s family, the pistol in question was secured in a safe, but the teen had managed to peek at the passcode and was able to access the gun without his parents’ knowledge. 

If that was the case, then a Child Access Prevention law really wouldn’t have mattered. 

Look, I’m all for encouraging parents to keep their firearms stored in a way their kids can’t access them. But I also recognize that there are plenty of juveniles who can be and are trusted to be safe and responsible with a firearm, and I believe that parents should be able to decide for themselves whether that’s the case with their own children. 

Criminal negligence can still come into play even without a gun storage mandate, and I believe that educational campaigns aimed at both parents and kids are the best way to prevent tragedies like the death of Petillo’s son. 

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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