Prompted by a discussion in the Battlestar Galactica thread for tonight’s episode.
My theory is that it is a relatively small percentage, and likely would vary among age brackets and location. In my generation (I’m 43), especially in the rural South, most men and plenty of women have some experience with guns. In younger generations and less gun friendly places, I suspect not very many people have that kind of experience.
Anybody know, or have a cite handy?
It would be almost impossible to find a real statistic on this, any more than we could find definitive statistics on the number of people who know how to fix their cars, install Linux, etc. We could get stats on the number of people who’ve taken gun safety classes, but that wouldn’t take into account auto-didacts or people who, on the other side, forget everything they’ve learned in their classes.
That being said - I think the more important question isn’t “how many people know gun safety?”, but “how many people know that there is such a thing as gun safety, and that it is vitally important to know it before you handle a gun?” I fall into the latter category, and I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of people do as well. I don’t know a damn thing about guns - and as a consequence, I would never even touch one of the things until I’d fixed that. I know, absolutely, that handling guns without knowing about them can get me killed. And that’s all I need to know, frankly.
Can handle a firearm safely?
In terms of raw capability to achieve safe handling, the answer is “almost all;” It’s not hard to learn the rules.
In terms of “Actually know what they should know,” the answer certainly falls into the millions, but how many millions? No one really knows. The vast majority of military veterans will have the rudimentary training. The majority of hunters will be trained (Maryland, for instance, makes such training part of the application pre-requisites for obtaining a license). Most people whome regularly target shoot will be trained - Few ranges will permit people on the line without at least some demonstratin of basic knowledge, even if it’s only so much as reading the range rules and signing an acknoledgement of awareness.
Should the number be higher? You betcha.
Depends on whaty you mean by “safely”. I am not an American, but my father was an army officer and he taught me how to use various firearms, their maintainance and safe employments etc. I would consider myself very competant on say the Glock, Garand, lee-Enfield .303. Not competant on others. Of course I have a rather different standard of what I consider “safe”, then most people.
Do you mean “safely handle” in the sense of “not shoot onesself or someone else accidentally” or “have taken a gun safety course”?
I can safely handle a gun. Especially one that isn’t loaded.
I’d go with not shooting, or otherwise endangering, anything one did not intend to kill.
I suppose that would raise the question of whether “handling” implies firing the gun at all. If you just happened to be holding a gun, with the safety on and no round chambered, it’s probably not all that dangerous for any sane adult.
The second sentence leads me to call into question the accuracy of the first. One of the fundamental rules of gun safety is that you should always assume that every gun is loaded. Too many people have been killed with guns that they “knew” weren’t loaded.
Of course you just broke the biggest rule of gun safety just by saying that.
Frankly, there’s still no solid cut off there. Example: someone might know to not point the gun at anything they don’t want to shoot, but they could be careless about checking what’s down range. Everything is about minimizing risks, there’s never absolute safety.
Still, I think you should start with the number of people that have visited a firing range in a given year, or have gone hunting. Most of those should know how to handle a gun with some minimum amount of competence. That should give you at least an order of magnitude guess. You could get a slightly better estimate by subtracting the incompetents, and adding those with previous experience that are out of practice.
Here’s a cite I just googled up. It looks like about 5% of the population here are active participants in shooting or hunting. That’s ballpark at least. Off the top of my head, I might bump that up to 10% to include people with experience that aren’t currently active.
Personally, I earned a target shooting merit badge with a .22 back in boy scouts, and occasionally go with my dad to a rifle range. I’d count myself as somewhat competent with most bolt-action and some semiautomatic rifles. Also, I’m good with muzzle loaders…
Never thought about that, but it would be interesting to compare the number with other countries - I’d suspect that some European countries, particularly those with national service still on the books, may actually have rates that would compare. (Practically every able-bodied male of my father’s and grandfather’s generation would have had rifle safety installed by means of Drill Sergeant, for instance.)
It’s probably a spectrum or sliding scale. In addition to the basic rules of safe handling, I would include knowing enough about different types of firearms to be certain of when a round is chambered, when the gun is safed or not, and the mode the gun can fire in. For example, I’m familiar enough with handguns to know how different models of semi-automatic work differently, such as single-action only vs. double-single or double, and how different makes safe, decock, and lock differently. On the other hand, I have little experience with long guns and if you handed me an AR-15, it might take me a while to figure out the basics such as chambering and clearing a round, or how you put it in safety.
Depends on if I am mad at you or not.
As to the OP, I think the % is much higher than you all are thinking. Can the average woman with no long gun experience at all handle an M1 Grand? Well to carry it around and not point it at people, sure. To actually use it, not so much, but for example I know many people of both sexes who maybe know how to shoot just one weapon who I would trust around me to handle or carry or put in the gun safe or closet almost all normally individually owned weapon with out endangering me or themselves or anyone else with the weapon loaded. Some of them hate or dislike guns but that is not what is being asked. No way to get valid %. There are lies, damn lies and statistics… That is also the order of truthfulness of that information…
Define safe handling, that is the problem.
Good point, but you’d at least be intimately familiar with the concepts of safety, chambering and clearing - and what to do and not to do with a weapon when taking it though its paces. That knowledge is transferable to most weapons.
I frequented a pistol target shooting club (back in Yurp) that trained all newbies on rifles first, simply for the range safety aspect. Much easier to catch a newbie starting to do something stupid with a long gun in time, and the experience translated easily enough when people graduated to pistols.
Fail.
This guy is the only one professional enough in that whole room to carry a gun, so the percentage must be pretty small.
I hear he’s actually sued to get that clip off youtube.
A police officer recently shot her self in the leg at the gun range where I live.
WTF?
It’s common sense.
This is recreational outrage, but I really don’t understand it. As others have said – ALWAYS treat a gun as if it was loaded and ready to fire. The safety isn’t. Don’t even bother with it. It’s pointless. Many guns don’t have them.
(I’m a bit pissed off that a sheriffs officer shot herself in the leg when it is SO EASY to be safe with a weapon.) She’s a police officer? Carries a gun every day all day long? But clearly does not know how to use it?
Great.
Most adults could, with reasonably safety, handle a revolver. I have far less confidence in their ability to handle other weapons with safety. The problem with firearm training is that it only makes sense to those who have had it. For example the “always treat a gun as if it is loaded” is a good catch-all rule, but fairly illogical in practice to someone who doesn’t handle firearms with regularity. For example, my friend recently got a new 9 millimeter and wanted to show it to me. I asked him to remove the ammunition and ensure that the chamber was clear before i handled the gun. He did so and handed it off to me. While inspecting it, I happened to point it his general direction and he freaked out telling me I ought to know better. I’ve had some training in the military and we didn’t use that standard of safety, preferring the “clear the gun and it is a paperweight” method.
The point is that “safely” is a relative term.
You know, I’ve heard that for years and I get tired of it. It’s an overstatement. Would you ram a hardwood rod with a cleaning patch on the end of it down the barrel of a loaded gun? I sure wouldn’t, but I’ve done it plenty of times with guns that were unloaded. I mean, you roll out the cylinder and there are six empty chambers. You can see light through them. Are you supposed to assume there’s some kind of invisible cartiridges in there?
When I unload a gun that gun is unloaded. As long as I retain control of that gun it stays unloaded, unless I load it of course. Now, if I leave it on the table and go take a leak, when I come back, sure, then it’s treated as if it were loaded, or if my friend hands me a gun and says it’s unloaded, that gets treated like a loaded gun for sure. He may be incompetent or malicious, I don’t trust people much.
So, the rule should be, treat every gun as if it were loaded, unless you have unloaded it yourself, and retain sole and continuous possession of it thereafter. It doesn’t exactly fall off the tongue though.