04.18.07

Protect Your Child From A Shooting – Read

Posted in Just A Thought at 5:25 am

This week started with a trio of tragedies: floods, the massacre in Virginia, and the death of a local senior on a charity trip to Ghana. The following are my thoughts on how to protect your child.

There are some things in life you cannot protect your child against – airplane parts falling on your home, a crazy person entering a building and shooting the students. You would not reinforce your home to withstand debris from space, you shouldn’t be running drills to handle violent attacks – the cost of teaching your child that their world is unsafe when in reality it isn’t. is too high.

There are things you can do however, to significantly protect your child from a shooting. Conventional wisdom says ask the parents of the children your child has playdates with if they have guns in the house. You then remind them to either store their guns safely with ammo in a separate location or check them for the next 8 or so years at the local precinct or rifle club. Of course, this path gets short-circuited the moment the questioned family lies about the gun, looking to avoid a confrontation.

A much better solution is to read Guns: What you Should Know by Rachel Schulson to your children and their friends when they are young – starting around 3 and through 1st grade. Not only will you insure that a significant number of small children in your community know to leave the room if someone has a gun, it is in a form no gun-owning parent will object to.

If, in the process of reading the book, a child volunteers that their parents have a gun, it is probably not productive to ‘confront’ that parent. File this under the same category as the time they tell you about their parent’s fight. (If you have kids, you are not going to have a moment of privacy for the next several years – it may be your fights or other embarrassing actions that are being broadcast to the neighborhood by your 4-year-old). Hopefully everyone involved is ignoring children’s stories unless safety issues are involved. Instead, read the book every few months to the children (all of them) and consider scheduling more playdates at your house.

Most kids grow up and have families of their own with no problems. Being shot by a demented person at school is about as likely as having an airplane fall on your house – much less likely than winning the lottery. Gun accidents are unfortunately more common and, for the most part, preventable. Do your part.

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