The Importance of Teaching Children Gun Safety

Nine times out of ten when you hear about a child shooting another child the story will go something like this: the child will have been playing with a weapon that was left within their reach. The child will be a child that was not raised around guns and have more than likely never touched a gun in their life. Their entire knowledge of these weapons will be what they have seen in the movies and on television. So they do not comprehend the real damage that these weapons are capable of inflicting. Their curiosity causes them to pick up the weapon and they accidentally shoot themselves or someone else.

If the child in question had been taught what a gun could really do to a person they would more than likely never have played with the weapons? Children are naturally curious and they see these items on the television. They need to see these items in real life and they need to be taught all of the things they can do to remain safe around a gun.

Children should be taught where the safety is located on a gun and how to tell if the safety is on or off. Many accidents happen because the person thought the safety was on. They should be taught that you never pick up a gun without checking the safety and ascertaining what position it is in.

Children need to be taught that an unloaded weapon is the most dangerous weapon of all. Many lives are taken every year because the person that was holding the gun assumed that the gun was not loaded. They should be taught to treat every gun as if it were fully loaded, even if they were the ones that removed the shells from the gun.

Children should be taught that the most important part of gun safety is that you never point a weapon at anyone that you do not intend to kill. You never point a gun at a friend when you are playing because a gun is not a toy it is a deadly weapon. You have to teach children what power these weapons have and that they have to respect that power.

Children need to know that on television people can get shot and jump right up in thirty minutes. They need to know that in real life when people get shot they probably will never get back up again.

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