It's About Gun Access, Not Control
by Gavin de Becker, Family Safety ExpertFamily Safety Expert Gavin de Becker reflects on school shootings, and tells us how we can reduce gun violence in the U.S.
It's not about gun control
America's children live in a climate of fear -- more so now than ever before. But understand that schools are still some of the safest places your children ever go, and multiple shootings at school are very rare events. In fact, a child is vastly more likely to have a heart attack, and child heart attacks are so rare that most parents (correctly) never even consider the risk.
In virtually every category of hazard, kids are safer today than in the 1960s -- though you wouldn't know it from the news.
There is one category of safety, however, which has worsened dramatically: guns. More than a million kids brought a gun to school last year. As if that weren't alarming enough, gunshots are now the leading cause of death of teenage boys in America. When we were young, it was car accidents. What happened? Cars got safer and guns got more dangerous. Sadly, the gun crisis is worsening, since another 16,000 guns are manufactured every day. Each one has a shelf-life of four hundred years, far outliving the consumer who buys it.
Everyday, 15 kids die in the U.S. from gunfire.*
I don't call this the "gun control" issue, because that phrase mires the discussion in politics and perceived rights and paranoia -- and it really gets off the point.
The issue for parents is gun access.
*Every day in 1994 in this country, 16 children age 19 and under were killed with guns and 64 were wounded.
National Center for Health and Statistics, 1996.
How to limit access to guns
Make sure that any guns in your home are securely stored and locked. Never assume a child or teen doesn't know how a gun works, or where it's kept, or how to unlock it. They know all those things. Almost all parents successfully keep another piece of technology out of the hands of their teenagers when they want to: the car. Be at least that careful with guns.
Can you take comfort if you don't have a gun in your house? Yes, some comfort, but if you've got a son, friends of his have guns in their homes. So when your child (of any age) sleeps over somewhere, ask if there are unsecured guns in the house. A-S-K can stand for "Asking Saves Kids."
Mark Twain, the great chronicler of boyhood, called guns in the hands of the young, "the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don't have to have any sights on the gun, you don't have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him." Twain speculated that the most effective army in the world could be made up of young boys who'd found an old gun they presumed to be unloaded -- because they never miss.
Although I have not expressed a single political thought about guns, some of my comments could be misunderstood as advocacy, so let me be clear:
- I oppose allowing children to have unsupervised access to guns.
- I favor enhanced gun-safety requirements.
These are challenges we can do something about.
