I am 51y now and took a slightly different approach than my dad did. My dad taught me the basic safety of guns and took me shooting every couple of years. He is/was not a hunter and I also had no interest in hunting. We just shot at tin cans and I would throw some clay pigeons for him out at my grandpa's farm. The rest of the time the guns were hidden away.
My approach was to not hide them, but make them a part of the house not much different than the vacuum cleaner or pliers or any other tool. Every tool as its purpose and it is only to be used for that purpose and taken care of. Our only child, a daughter, is now 14y and has seen a handgun on my hip since as long as she can remember. She had no interest in shooting herself until about 9y, but prior to that I did teach her about how to safely handle a gun and check to see if it was loaded and unload one. I was very proud the first time I took her to look for her first handgun. We went to several places when she was about 11y to look at different .22lr models and feel which one she liked the best. BTW, she ended up picking the Colt 1911-22 Glod Cup model.
Anyway, the proud part was that in the first and every store we went to, when the sales person placed the gun on the counter for me to check I would let her check it since it was for her. Ya'll have seen this before. Almost all these places keep a magazine in the handgun and while they do check to make sure it is not loaded before placing it on the counter for the person to look at, they always leave the magazine inserted and almost always leave the slide forward. Well, every time she picked one up she dropped the magazine and checked the chamber to make sure it was empty before doing anything else, while keeping it pointed in a safe direction. It put a big smile on my face to see the sales persons face when they saw that. Let me know I had done everything right so far.
Firearms are no mystery to my daughter and she likes to shoot. It is not a top priority for her. Right now, softball is and getting ready for high school next month are. She likes to shoot her M&P 15-22 more than a handgun and has recently fired her grandpa's .410 bolt shotgun. She fired my Benelli M2 3-gun last year, but didn't care for it much. She's a strong kid and I knew she could handle it, but she didn't care for it. She did ask about it and wanted to try it. I didn't push her to try it. I did have to do a little convincing with the .410 because of the Benelli, but she really liked it. I've tried shooting trap with it and can do okay, so I'm hoping to get her interested in that a little and eventually working up to either a 20ga something or maybe even a 12ga.
I'm no firearms expert or svengali about all things dad. Just ask her, but it seems as though I got this one thing right with this one. My one regret is not having started her out with a single shot or bolt action rifle instead of a semiauto. She really likes to load up those mags and go through them pretty quick. We've recently begun practicing drills and different things with a timer working on quickness and accuracy at various times. And every now and then we have our own little precision competition. She's fired everything I have except for the larger caliber rifles. She's asked about them and we may give one or two a try the next time out.
