Gun Safety Starts at Home: Parents Urged to Discuss It With Their Children

There is an ongoing epidemic, and it is preventable, experts say.

In the wake of a six-year-old child carrying a handgun in his backpack to school and shooting his teacher inside the classroom, cries for stricter gun laws and debates on gun safety have never been louder.

According to Be Smart, an organization that promotes safe gun storage, every day, one child in an American household gets to find a gun and unintentionally or intentionally, like in the case of kindergarten teacher Abigail 'Abby' Zwerner, shoots someone or themselves. Statistics showed that there was an increase in these cases during the pandemic.

It is a crisis in the country, and Esther Sanchez-Gomez, the legislative lead for the New York-based Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, cannot help but stress how it is "frustratingly avoidable."

"It's crazy to have such a massive, massive public health epidemic that's preventable. And yet, for some reason, we're not seeing change," she declared.

Talk about it: Open discussion at home

Mental Health experts emphasized how crucial it is for parents to educate children on gun safety. Unless an honest discussion about the dangers of guns happens at home, shooting incidents involving kids and teenagers will arise.

Keith Hamm, one of the mental health experts, encouraged parents to be aware of their children's ability to process and understand and that good parenting means being able to communicate truths and facts to them, WITN reported.

Gun safety education should start at home, parents in Pitt county stated.

One parent, Todd Karriker, shared how he raised his kids around guns and how, from an early age, he has taught them to respect and never touch guns. His kids were told of the gun safety laws, how to always treat a gun as loaded, how to not touch it unless there is an adult around, and how, when they find one, to immediately let an adult know.

Karriker also emphasized the importance of having safe storage where the guns can be locked up and concluded that, ultimately, it all falls as the responsibility of the parents. There will be no one else to blame.

Act on it: Store guns properly

It is a fact that there are laws that require guns to be stored away from children's reach. However, it is also true that this law is not applicable in all states. Thus, Sanchez-Gomez emphasized that every firearm owner everywhere, whether under the law or not, should know that they have to store their guns properly and out of reach of the young ones.

She further stressed that there would be a dramatic decrease of 85 percent in self-inflicted injuries among children in homes if guns were stored properly.

Critics have highlighted a loophole that protects gun owners from carrying their guns for self-defense, like storing them in their car's glove compartment while their child is in the passenger seat.

According to WUFT, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a gun safety bill in May 2019 that would set a criminal liability for people not storing guns out of children's reach at home. The bill has been called by activists as Ethan's Law in honor of 15-year-old Ethan Song from Connecticut, who shot himself at his friend's house in 2018.

The public is still waiting for the bill to pass, and as months and years go by, the waiting becomes frustrating as it is a "no-brainer to pass a law like that," Stacey Wesch, a steering committee member from Florida Gun Owners for Safety and mother of a Parkland High School shooting survivor, declared. The bill, she said, would reduce teen suicide, unintentional shootings, and school shootings.

Just this month, the Duval County School Board sent parents a video of Superintendent Diana Greene and schools police chief Greg Burton promoting safe gun storage at home. It emphasized that securing guns can save lives, and it begins at home. Parents should ensure that their families are well-informed but also empowered and safe.