Gun accidents due to children not playing with toy guns

[philip964]

This occurred to me today. There have been a couple of recent accidental gun shootings here in Houston involving teenagers.

Is this because the teenagers were denied toy guns as children?

I couldn't wait for Christmas as this meant a new toy gun. I was just a little too old and missed the "fanner fifty", but I had plenty of other less capable cap guns.

When you pulled the trigger the cap went off and there was a bang.

Are children being denied toy guns now and therefore do not understand that when you pull the trigger they go bang and if the gun is pointed at something important when the trigger is pulled, it is destroyed.

The gun always seems to be discovered by the teenager and before the night is over, the teenager has accidentally shot someone.

Maybe television and the movies do not provide enough education about how guns work. They certainly do not learn about it at school.

Just thinking.

[SRH78]

Kids are curious and telling them don't touch doesn't work when there is little discipline in the home. That is why these things happen. Imo, a teenager should have been taught how to handle a firearm safely. Also, seeing first hand what a bullet does to a game animal or even a jug of water helps hammer home the importance of safety.

[Jasonw560]

Kids are curious and telling them don't touch doesn't work when there is little discipline in the home. That is why these things happen. Imo, a teenager should have been taught how to handle a firearm safely. Also, seeing first hand what a bullet does to a game animal or even a jug of water helps hammer home the importance of safety.

Part of the reason I insisted on my boys getting the birds we shot, and have them help us clean them. It shows them the finality of the physical being when something is shot.

[surprise_i'm_armed]

Everybody on TV or in a movie carries a gun with their finger on the trigger. Idiots.

So every untrained kid, or even older, picks up a gun and uses the trigger as the "handle"
to the gun, instead of indexing.

Some LEO's even run with their finger on the trigger, and it goes off when they club someone's head with it.
(See a recent video of this).

SIA

[Thomas]

Maybe television and the movies do not provide enough education about how guns work. They certainly do not learn about it at school.

Just thinking.

Just thinking here too:

Most liberal parents demand that schools teach sex education. You can use the Internet to search for lists of reasons others put together arguing for sex education in school. The thing is, almost all of those points can be applied to gun education. "If they know how a gun works, then they won't accidentally fire one." "If they know how babies are made, they won't accidentally make one." etc

From Yahoo:
"If this issue is not addressed by our schools and we leave it up to the media, parents who either aren't comfortable or just simply refuse to discuss the topic, or our kids' friends..."
Sounds about right.

Heck, I wonder if there are any schools in other countries that teach properly about guns (not "don't touch and tell an adult" stuff that they do in our schools).

To mods: I hope this is on topic enough and still rated G, if not please delete and inform me.

[smoothoperator]

Young adults who were exposed to responsible alcohol use growing up had lower rates of binge drinking and drunk driving than young adults who grew up in an environment where alcohol was forbidden. It might be the same with firearms.

[WildBill]

This occurred to me today. There have been a couple of recent accidental gun shootings here in Houston involving teenagers.

Is this because the teenagers were denied toy guns as children?

I couldn't wait for Christmas as this meant a new toy gun. I was just a little too old and missed the "fanner fifty", but I had plenty of other less capable cap guns.

When you pulled the trigger the cap went off and there was a bang.

Are children being denied toy guns now and therefore do not understand that when you pull the trigger they go bang and if the gun is pointed at something important when the trigger is pulled, it is destroyed.

The gun always seems to be discovered by the teenager and before the night is over, the teenager has accidentally shot someone.

Maybe television and the movies do not provide enough education about how guns work. They certainly do not learn about it at school.

Just thinking.

My brothers, friends and I played with toy guns since we were five years old. Back then, it was a normal thing to do. There were plenty of westerns and WWII movies and shows on TV that showed people shooting guns. Toy companies advertised and sold millions of toy guns to young children. I posted this about four years ago. viewtopic.php?f=23&t=14609&hilit=+your+ ... a+wise+man" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

FWIW, here is my story. When I was around eight years old I asked my dad if I could shoot with him. He told me that he would have to think about it. This cycle repeated a few times. Then one day he asked me if I really wanted to learn to shoot. Of course I answered "yes." He told me that I had a choice, whether to keep playing with toy guns or get rid of them and learn to shoot real guns. He told me that real guns were not toys and that if acted like they were that would be the last time I would be allowed around real guns. I chose the real guns and gave up playing.

[OldCannon]

Everybody on TV or in a movie carries a gun with their finger on the trigger. Idiots.

Actually, this isn't very true nowadays. In the last several years, my stepson has made it something of a "contest" to see if he can spot unsafe gun handling. Admittedly, we don't let him watch much TV with gunplay in it (not that we're anti-violence freaks, we just don't feel like a young boy needs to watch TV-M stuff). We do occasionally see movies with gunplay and he's pretty fast to spot properly indexed trigger fingers, etc. The last several years have seen a relative increase in the "quality" of that.

The problem is that MOST kids can't tell "good gunhandling" from "bad gunhandling", and all they can do is emulate what they think they see.

On the other hand, I'm still not convinced the "accidents per capita" has significantly changed over the decades. My dad used to do accident investigations, which unfortunately included gunfire "Accidents." Even in the 60's, you had idiots and kids killing or hurting themselves. This seemed (and still seems) to track with population density. Higher densities tend to have less firearms training, increased youth curiosity, and less skilled adult supervision (because the adults have little or no firearms training). I think it's only "epidemic" now because the news goes, "OMG! ANOTHER POOR CHILD ACCIDENTALLY SHOT BY AN EVIL GUN!" vs yesteryear when it was, "Well, some parent clearly failed to raise their child properly."