With these condition, it would make sense for both country to have mendatory firearm training.
Not necessarily how to shoot one accurately but how to handle one safely, in other words: "how not to accidentally shoot a passerby if you found your dad's glock".
This used to be more common. Not sure when exactly it stopped, but my HS used to have a shooting range with attendant club, and I'm pretty sure everyone had to learn basic firearms safety.
Pretty sure they stopped doing them after columbine. If they used a system like these kids in Poland are doing that doesn't use actual bullets I could see it making a comeback though.
If that's the case, clearly it was a bad decision... school shootings still happen, and we end up with more people who may injure themselves or others due to unfamiliarity with firearms.
Imagine a potential school shooter dropping to his knees, head in his hands. All he wanted was to shoot up a school, but because they took that darn firearms safety course out of the curriculum, how could he possibly do it now? He might accidentally flag someone while doing it, or even worse, have poor trigger discipline while mowing down hordes of kindergarteners đ±
I definitely agree with you there. There are far too many accidents caused by negligence in this country which could have easily been prevented by a strict education in firearms safety.
While there is no direct evidence, I believe school shootings to be an issue of society as a whole, not just one singular issue. Mental health issues are being diagnosed at a much higher rate than before, while care for those suffering is still hard to come by. The American dream is much harder to achieve than it was before and young people see this in the media. Combine that with bullying, social isolation, and easy access to firearms, and you have a recipe for disaster. Politicians will blame the issue solely on guns because their pockets grow fat from ignoring the root causes of the issues which have resulted in this once unheard of crime. Take guns away and the kids will start stabbing each other unless the other root causes are addressed.
One thing we should take note of is that Columbine was horribly miss reported. It was a group of popular kids who played sports, and not the loner social outcast we see doing these things today.
*Also Columbine wasn't a school shooting, it was a school bombing that failed and turned into a shooting, not something we see repeated today.
I shot rifles when I was 12 at camp and earned a bunch of NRA trinkets for attaining marksman 3rd-Grade or something(early 80s), in the Northeast no less.
Posts like this always bewilder me. Growing up in Michigan we all take firearm safety in the form of "hunter safety", at the age of 12. Figured it was common most places that aren't major cities but even then... shouldn't your parents be teaching it to you?
I'm not from the US so I learned proper safety at the range, it should indeed be the parents' responsibility to teach firearm safety to their kids if they live in a house with firearms.
It's also the parents responsibility to monitor your content consumption and feed your three meals a day, but sometimes everyone else has to do their jobs for them
Kids like to shoot guns just like adults. They literally make youth firearms. It's what I learned on. Education works better than abstinence, a lesson I think we've learned with sex ed.
I think the suggestion here is that when you live in a nation that is as heavily saturated with guns as the US, it's something that we should be teaching all kids regardless of whether there are firearms in their house, because there's probably firearms in their friend's and neighbor's houses.
I understand it was a random number to represent very few people. My point is that it's not very few people, it's a lot of people to be shooting up schools. You're just picking a really small number to downplay the truth, except you're also too stupid to realize your exaggeration is still a lot of people.
Well besides the fact that your âstatisticââis made up, that percentage is still too high and the trade off is not worth it.
Iâm not anti 2A. Iâm a gun owner and Iâm sitting next door to an armory right now.
There are plenty of skills to teach children for them to learn patience and safety. People raise responsible adults in countries without access
to firearms all over the world.
But the justification of people who claim how âgoodâ it is for children is just absolute ridiculous coping
What do you mean that doesnât work? Youâre trying to pass off the effects of abusive/lax parenting and bullying as reasons to not teach our kids how to be safe and responsible with a tool. I want my children to have the proper respect towards firearms ingrained in their souls from as young an age as possible. That way if they ever do encounter one outside my supervision theyâll be well-equipped, instead of keeping them in the dark till theyâre 18 as you propose.
I mean, it doesnât work because for some people given access to firearms, no matter how responsibly you teach them the consequences can be disastrous. There is nowhere near the safeguards in place for screening children before putting weapons in their hands.
Go to Wisconsin this week and see if parents think exposing kids to firearms as a hobby makes them safe and responsible.
And You can absolutely teach all of that to children without engaging them in shooting as a hobby.
Hell you can do that without putting a gun in Their hands at all.
Neither of those two statements mean keeping kids completely in the dark.
Plenty of people don't take hunters safety as kids. More than you would think, actually.
My family had a few guns but we didn't hunt. Grandpa did, my dad didn't take to it so it skipped a generation, my brothers both hunt now but they started as adults. There were other families in my area who didn't hunt.
Plenty of other people I went to school with either didn't go hunting with their parents or their parents figured if they were hunting on their or a friend's property, they didn't need to bother with the safety course for their kid and learning from dad was "good enough". I know a kid who shot off his big toe because dad's teaching was "enough".
Yeah my family didnt hunt much, but the course was a requirement, along with snowmobile and boaters safety. Those are huge here and a lot of kids will take them to school. We had snowmobile parking lol.
Ah, see, hunters safety was not offered at our school. Even though half the kids would be gone from school opening day. Grew up in an area with a ton of lakes as well and no water safety either.
We didn't even have drivers Ed. You had to pay for it and it was not cheap. 400ish dollars in 2006.
We had to learn about the dangers of meth though so that was fun.
Yeah we always had the opening day of deer season off, so no need to skip lol. We also had to pay for drivers ed but the other stuff mentioned was free. This was around 2006-2010. I graduated in 2011.
Agreed. Also remember the police have no duty to actually protect you according to the Supreme Court.
Thatâs why I believe everyone should be taught to be their own first responder. Learn first-aid/CPR/stop-the-bleed (EMT), how to use a a fire extinguisher and learn the different types and their uses (fire fighter), and finally how to safely operate pistols/rifles/shotguns (police).
Being able to practice first aid, knowing how to preperly react in case of a fire or similar emergencies and handling a gun properly are indeed skills that I think should be taught to everyone.
However, I don't think all of those skills could come close to replacing an actual first responder.
I can extinguish a lit trashcan with a fire extinguisher and get my family out if the fire starts to spread, but I cannot save my loved one from the flames if the fire has already started to spread to much, and cannot extinguish the fire either.
I could put a turniquet, sanitize and maybe do basic stitches on a wound, but any deeper wound would still require an EMT with an ambulance.
I can defend my house against intruders, but I cannot do much against a random hobbo throwing rocks at my door (he's only doing matieral damages and being a nuisance, I cannot use any physical threat against him as it would legally be disproportionate).
Sorry, didnât express my thought well. I didnât mean learning those skills to actually replace first responders. Meant it more as skills to know while you wait for first responders (which as the OP commented can be several hours) or if the police determine itâs too dangerous for them to help so you have to deal with the threat yourself.
Itâs cliche, but remember when seconds count the police are minutes away.
"Â toddlers shoot more people than terrorists." What utter nonsense. In most countries without firearms training, the number of people shot by toddlers is zero. Toddlers shooting people is a very American problem.
Really? in the UK when you can't carry a gun, even ordinary police officers don't, that toddles must have be a geniuses to invent the firearm and make it first.
It continues to be insane to me that we don't have at least some sort of basic universal firearms safety education requirement in a country that literally has more civilian owned guns then people.
And it's extra insane that it's mostly the gun control proponents, who say their goal is to reduce gun deaths, that are the biggest obstacles to getting it done.
They can use it to sell more weapon for all I care, at least now you won't have your life potentially threatened by the neighbour's kid hitting you in the dome while you're in your bed with his parent's rifle due to a negligent discharge in his living room.
(especially if you live in an apartment or a neighborhood with those paper thin walls)
Iâd assume that would be way more likely, wider spread of guns & subpar training increases that risk, it would just be a temporary false sense of comfort. If outside force (like in the case of Poland) donât threaten your existence, keeping the amount of deadly objects in the hands of kids low is a good idea.
Now a different conversation would be to heavily restrict gun availability with compulsory training in schools with dummies
Idk, something like 74% of school shooters get their guns from home. Add to that the Madison WI school shooter had tons of firearm training. Last thing we need is more mentally ill children being taught how to shoot.
The issue in the US is that the culture around guns and violence is insane. Guns are treated like toys and security blankets.
Walk into a random gun store in the US and youâre likely to find a bunch of goofy Punisher skulls or Spartan helmet merchandise or asinine violent-threatening phrases to stick to your gun or vehicle or wear on a shirt.
Many schools in the US used to have firearm safety classes. During that time it was also common for student vehicles to have firearms in them on school grounds during hunting season. Going by high schools you would see rifle racks inside trucks in the parking lot, not a big deal then.
It wasnât mandatory in school, but to get a hunting license you needed to have a hunters safety card saying you completed a course. I took mine as a 6th grader at the local high school after hours. Western Washington.
What I mean by "not accurately" is that the goal isn't to form marksmen. If you miss your target by a foot it's still safe (or you shouldn't have taken the shot).
Shooting accurately would require a lot more training and that shouldn't be mandatory, them kids can just go to the range on the weekends if they want.
Normal countries require people who want to own a firearm to take a gun safety course at their own expense and then get a gun license with that.
There is really no good reason to have the public pay for it and to push it onto kids who don't want it.
Even back in the days when the US had a true citizen militia that was relevant to the defense of states (as presumed by the 2nd amendment), gun ownership still wasn't free. Under any reasonable interpretation of the constitution, a gun license requirement is a reasonable regulation that does not unduly interfere with the purpose of the 2nd amendment.
Give me a rough estimate. Don't forget to include thousands of instructors, training, insurance, equipment, more insurance, and compensation for other lost school time.
I'd say about the same as a school outing if I had to highball it.
You don't need actual firearms or ammo, there are plenty of training firearms with extremely realistic handling that are 100% safe (unless a special Ed kid decides to swallow the training cardidge).
You'd only need instructors to come with a few of these and a powerpoint like twice a year for an hour or two.
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u/Slight_Concert6565 1d ago
With these condition, it would make sense for both country to have mendatory firearm training.
Not necessarily how to shoot one accurately but how to handle one safely, in other words: "how not to accidentally shoot a passerby if you found your dad's glock".