Search String: Guns and growing up

My readership has hit an all time low, probably because of the lack of content. However I am getting some interesting search strings. One of which is this:

do kids realize how powerful a gun is

Interesting. I will draw from my own experiences for this.

I wasn't raised around guns as a kid at all. They were these things that I see in cartoons. I saw starter guns, the Elmer Fudd shotgun, and I saw flashy beam guns on Power Rangers. I would make believe with guns all the time - it was the thing to kill monsters and evil bad guys. But in my mind, I never fully understood guns.

Fast forward a bit until I was in 5th grade. That was when Columbine happened. I remember all the teachers being very hush-hush about the subject; they knew that they should talk to us kids about it but words were hard to come by. The teachers assured us that we were safe in our school and to their credit, I don't remember once hearing about guns being used in the massacre. Rather, they told us that the acts were done by very disturbed people. I think this was instrumental in my development as a gun owner. It was the disturbed individuals that committed the act; not the guns. But that's something for me to write about later.

Now, I remember visiting my grandparents in Philadelphia one time with my cousins. We were running around the place like the little children we were when a rumor started spreading around that there was a gun in the house. So as curious demons, we started looking around for the thing. I wasn't the one that found it, but soon we all flocked together to look at it. I remember that the gun was an old semi-automatic. It was rusted on the inside and the slide and barrel were missing. All we found was the frame.

And thank God that the gun wasn't operable, because we were stupid children and didn't know any better. Something bad could have happened there. Because we didn't know. We were never taught.

So, going back to the search string/question. "Do kids realize how powerful a gun is?"

I would personally say "no," because no one taught me about guns and safety. I ended up learning on my own about it when I started considering gun ownership during 2009. Now if a child grew up with a father that hunted, or was raised by a responsible gun owning adult, then yes; they would probably know about the dangers of firearms. They would be safe around them.

I guess my final point is that kids will not know about the dangers of irresponsible firearms use unless they are taught about it by some guardian or another. It's in the same lines of drug and sex education. All kids will be ignorant of dangers until someone tells them about it. Since there are really no school sanctioned programs for teaching firearms safety the way there are anti-drug and sex education programs, then it's up to the parents to make sure kids know the rules around firearms.