Shucks, I’m just two posts too late. I came in here to tell the OP that etiquette columnist Miss Manners actually has addressed the question about whether and how parents may inquire about guns at the houses where the children play.
I can’t remember the exact date or wording of the column, but she said that parents should politely state their concerns and ask for the information they need. Something along the lines of “I’m afraid we feel Johnny isn’t old enough yet to play unsupervised in houses where there are firearms” [or “unsecured firearms”, or whatever your safety criterion is], “so could you tell us what your house policy is on guns?”
Of course, it would be impolite to do this in a hostile or suspicious way, as though you think the other family is likely to be negligent or untrustworthy about this. But you definitely are entitled to ask about your children’s playmates’ families’ firearms policies, as long as you do it politely.
Yes, I’m wondering about that too. Mightn’t there be a possible legal liability issue if one of the kids’ playmates hurts himself with one of the family’s guns?
Of course, Crafter_Man’s first post in the thread stated that “we are quite immersed in the gun culture, as are all of our friends”. So maybe he just never lets any non-gun-savvy kids into his house in the first place.
When friends come over with children, the lifeguard’s on duty… my wife and I keep a close eye on everything. The degree of oversight depends on a couple factors:
Prior experience has a lot to do with it. Have their children been over before? Were they well behaved? Did they not touch any firearms without asking first? If so, less oversight is necessary.
Were the children raised in a household where the guns were *not * locked up? If so, I have much less to worry about.
I keep my guns locked and out of sight. No nosy neighbor, or their kids will ever see them. Number one rule for my kid (6) regarding daddy’s guns is don’t touch. Number two rule is don’t tell anyone about daddy’s guns. Kind of like fight club.
But if you have kids, either the guns or the ammo- preferably both- must be locked up. Hidden don’t cut it. Kids can find anything. If you want a loaded gun ready for home defence, there are special gunsafes which open super fast made for a single handgun.
Now for longuns, a locked glass case (with the ammo locked up seperately) is fine.
When I was a kid, I found a gun at my freind’s house. It was quite well hidden. I was 5 or 6, and I would have went “bang bang” with it if the Mom hadn’t walked around the corner. :eek:
Now sure, older kids can be trained, but is everyone’s kid trained? Are they mature enough to really understand the training? And mature or no, trained or no, teens get weird and hormonal, and do crazy things.
This thread is absolutely consistent with the research in this area: parents who own guns who rely on training rather than preventing the children from having access to guns believe their kids are safe around guns. I am afraid, though, that the research also suggests that the parents are absolutely wrong.
From here: The majority of the parents in this study indicated that their child would not touch a gun unless an adult was present. Farah et al. (1999) and Stennies et al. (1999) both reported that parents have unrealistic views of what their child will do if they encounter unsupervised access to a gun. Additional studies have shown that despite education, children will handle a gun if they find one (Hardy, 2002; Jackman et al., 2001). This study’s finding that parents’ believe their children will be safe around guns if taught is not consistent with normal child development (Farah et al., 1999; Stennies et al., 1999). Despite parents’ perceptions, children can and do play with real guns regardless of being instructed not to (Hardy et al., 1996).
This always puzzles me; at three years old (the age of the children in question) I lived on a military base, which might be said to have something of a gun culture. Part of that gun culture, even way back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a tot, was keeping the guns physically separated from the children. Of course my parents taught us about guns and so on. They also kept the guns locked up. Because, you know, kids don’t always do as they should. I myself have zero fear of guns though I don’t own any any more – I live in the Netherlands where the regulation is not worth the trouble. But when I had a gun and there were children in my home or in my car where the gun was, it was secured. Because kids don’t always do as they should.
I have no real interest in criticising any individual’s parenting, I am sure that any poster here’s kids are shining examples of propriety and caution. But the belief that one’s kids are safe is widespread; and the evidence seems clear that in most cases that belief is not rational.
When I was nine and my brother eleven, we spent an afternoon lighting various fluids as they were being sprayed out of aerosol cans. We called it making blowtorches. We also scorched the wooden floor.
Good times!
Hey, your kid doesn’t read this board does he? Er, never mind…
I was a boy scout, so I had fire and knife training. When I was 9 or 10 I got a knife for Christmas. Not 30 minutes after I unwrapped it I cut myself. I was trying to open one of those plastic candy canes with candy inside. I made the cardinal sin of holding the cane down from where I was cutting. The blade slipped off the plastic and buried itself in my thumb. Four stitches. I know it’s four because I can count them on my scar.
As for fire, we used to play with matches on our screened in porch. We had these wooden tables with kind of slots in between wood slates. We would stick matches in there and have them burn like dominos. Another thing we used to do was get cans of flammable shit like WD-40 and tape a candle in front of the nozzle. Easy to make flame thrower. I remember one time we were screwing around with these streamer things. You pull the string and it shoots off some streamers. Anyways, we took apart a shit load of these things and put the powder together. One of the dumbasses we were with accidentally set the pile off and burned his fingers bad enough to go to the hospital. Then there were the fireworks, bonfires, and a dozen other things I don’t remember.
Bottom line. No matter how well you train a kid they do stupid shit. It’s best not to give them easy access to devices that will make their stupid shit fatal.
First off, Crafter_Man’s house sounds really creepy. Just sayin’.
This stood out to me, and I think it’s an attitude that a lot of gun owner hold, but I really think it’s flawed. What’s unsupervised? Is no child ever let out of your sight? Are they allowed, at, say 10 yrs old, to walk down the hall to the bathroom by themselves? What if they see something interesting on the way to the bathroom (or trip over a shotgun in the case of Crafter Man’s house)? I’m not sure it’s really feisable to completely supervise all actions of children in your house. Now, SSG Schwartz may mean that no children are allowed in his house, ever, and in that case I agree that none are unsupervised, so I’m not picking on him per say, just the idea that you can have kids in your house and watch them every second.
Also, I’m not afraid or paranoid about guns at all, but I don’t feel that just because nothing has happened so far with guns scattered about the house does not prove that children are 100% trustable. That, to me, is naive.
None of this really addresses the OP, but I think she’s gotten plenty of good advice on that topic.
Because you want to see it that way. Crafter_Man is not your average American gun owner (and I certainly don’t mean that as a dig). Aside from him and I, I’m not sure how many gun-owning parents have posted in this thread. jtgain never actually stated he had children (I don’t think), just that no one under 5’8" could find his gun.
Unless I missed something (totally possible), you’re looking at a sample size of two, with one locking guns and one not locking guns.
Make the sample size three. I have three kids, oldest is six. My guns have been locked up since before they were born. All (30+) but one.
No offense to the OP, but if my neighbor came in to my house and told me that their kids couldn’t come over because of my guns, my kitchen knives in the knife block, the unlocked channels on my TV, or anything else that they felt would endanger their children, I’d politely tell them of the precautions that I take to keep my own children safe. If that was not good enough, it’s really not my problem at that point.
I’ve already been told that one of the neighborhood kids can’t play at our house because I allow my son to have play guns and play swords. I can’t say that I am losing any sleep over it.
I think I am looking at a sample size of one, at least there’s only one fessing up. But I don’t see how my perception comes into it, I didn’t design or carry out any of that research.
Of course people who rely on training rather than locking guns up think their kids are safe. They have to. If they thought their kids were not safe, they would probably…you know, lock the guns up.
Some of the experiments in this area were designed IIRC to show that education did in fact make kids safe when they were around a gun unsupervised. It’s just that the results didn’t come out that way.
I imagine it’s possible that any particular poster here’s kids would be the very ones in that same experimental work who went and got an adult when they encountered a gun while unsupervised, or didn’t mess with it. But no one has yet been able to work out an identifiable factor or factors which would make that predictable. Familiarity with guns, for instance, does not seem to make a difference.
And the kids they were working with were much older than the ones in the OP. The notion that three year olds could be trained/taught in such a way as to render them safe while unsupervised around firearms is just not consistent with what we know about child development. Or so it seems to me.
No, you just made the statement that this thread is consistent with the research. I see no consistency at all, nor any reason to conclude that most gun-owning parents rely solely on training to keep their kids safe from their guns. One person in the thread does, but without knowing his children and their friends, I’m not prepared to comment on the reliability of his technique. 2/3’s of respondents rely on both training and locked storage, making them at least as safe as someone relying only on locked storage.
I am a gun owning parent… barely. The only firearm in my house right now is a bolt action M44 WW2 rifle. It is currently located in the basement, in a zipped up rifle bag.
When it is not actively being fired, the bolt is not in the rifle. The ammunition is stored seperately. Needless to say, this weapon is not a home defense firearm.
My youngest just turned 3. Probably this summer, I will allow him in the basement when I’m cleaning it. My older 2, 12 and 10, will be taken to the rifle range with me this summer, and given the basics of gun safety (unless their mother has already covered it, which I doubt).
I consider a bolt action rifle with the bolt removed “safe” for all intents and purposes.
I hope to have either a handgun or a shotgun in the home by the summer. It will be stored (either one) in a safe location, with a trigger lock in place.
If anyone asked, I would inform them of this, and offer to show them the locations of storage before their children visited. If it were not satisfactory, I would discuss it with them to determine what I could do that would not be a HUGE imposition.
I am willing to inconvenience myself a bit for the sake of my childrens fledgling social lives. Hehehe
Exactly. The problem comes in at the moment that 100% drops down to 99.99%.
While I can’t speak for him, I think this was Mr. Excellent’s point. I don’t think anyone believes that all guns are always loaded even when they’re not; just that they should be treated as such.
I’m confused by your earlier post, then:
Does this mean you are OK with leaving loaded guns everywhere in your house, without any locks? If not, then you’re definitely not “treating every gun as if it were loaded.”
LilShieste
Treating a gun as though it were loaded typically means to keep it pointed in a safe direction and fingers out of the trigger guard. If a gun is unloaded and under a bed, it is not being “treated” as anything at all. Once it is picked up, care is required.
What’s there to be confused about? There’s a world of difference between a loaded and unloaded gun. None-the-less, all guns - whether they’re loaded or unloaded - should be treated and handled as if they were loaded. This is because we don’t want two different sets of rules (one for loaded, the other for unloaded). To keep things simple, we only want one set of rules.
