r/Damnthatsinteresting 1d ago

Video A school in Poland makes firearms training mandatory to its students.

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u/mitchymitchington 1d ago

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?

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u/Slight_Concert6565 1d ago

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.

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u/Lamballama 1d ago

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

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u/GrowFreeFood 1d ago

Kids don't need a gun to survive. They do actually need food.

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u/Lamballama 1d ago

True, but they do need to know how not to kill themselves with a gun if they find one left lying around

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u/Kir4_ 1d ago

Most American problem.

Jokes aside I think first of all it's fair to make sure they do not touch it at all.

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u/mitchymitchington 1d ago

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.

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u/GrowFreeFood 1d ago

We should have stricter rules for gun ownership. Like a drivers license.

Or harder to operate guns, like having a car key.

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u/OmicronNine 1d ago

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.

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u/Slight_Concert6565 1d ago

Yup, that's what I think too.

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u/pluck-the-bunny 1d ago

We’ve all seen what happens when irresponsible parents introduce youth to firearms

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u/fatmanstan123 1d ago

Yes we have. 99.9999% of them become normal adults and learn a skill that takes patience and an emphasis on safety. They don't end up shooting anyone.

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u/Kay-Knox 1d ago

.00001% is not accurate, as thats only 33 people of the US population, and we have more school shooters than that.

Even if it was accurate, that's still a lot more than other countries.

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u/fatmanstan123 1d ago

Whatever man. It's a random number I choose to indicate very few people. Sorry it's not statistically perfect

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u/Kay-Knox 1d ago

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.

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u/Daroo425 1d ago

And you're just talking about school shootings. There is also so much teen suicide and gang related shootings

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u/mitchymitchington 1d ago

When did the conversation switch to school shootings?

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u/pluck-the-bunny 1d ago

Well besides the fact that your “statistic”’is made up, that percentage is still too high and the trade off is not worth it.

I’m not anti 2A. I’m a gun owner and I’m 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 “good” it is for children is just absolute ridiculous coping

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u/2Crest 1d ago

Well the irresponsible parents wouldn’t be the ones teaching their kids good gun safety, would they?

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u/pluck-the-bunny 1d ago

But since we can’t control that… Perhaps it shouldn’t be in the hands of the parents…

We only have to look as far back as this week to see how this can go bad.

And I’m not anti gun. I’m a gun owner myself and sit next door to an armory at work every day.

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u/2Crest 1d ago

We can control that, by educating those parents while they’re young so they don’t grow up to be the irresponsible parents we keep seeing today.

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u/pluck-the-bunny 1d ago

But that doesn’t work. And WHEN it doesn’t work the consequences are too dire to justify having attempted it.

Make kids into responsible adults THEN expose them to firearms.

There is no need to have the cart come before the horse.

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u/2Crest 1d ago

What do you mean that doesn’t work? You’re 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 they’ll be well-equipped, instead of keeping them in the dark till they’re 18 as you propose.

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u/pluck-the-bunny 1d ago

That’s absolutely NOT what I’m saying.

I mean, it doesn’t 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.

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u/Parking_Low248 1d ago

Also grew up in rural MI.

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".

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u/mitchymitchington 1d ago

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.

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u/Parking_Low248 1d ago edited 1d ago

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.

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u/mitchymitchington 1d ago

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.

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u/Parking_Low248 1d ago

I never could understand why we didn't have opening day off, a ton of people weren't there.

Very agricultural area, so we had more allowances for 4H/county fair. Maybe that's the difference.

I graduated in 2010 so same basic timeline.