Thank you for taking the time to dive into the gun safety curriculum your child received (or will receive, or might receive). We hope to answer your questions in this article about our training, including:

• What are the rules?
• How can I use this curriculum?
• Why do we teach these rules?
• What practice can I give my child to build safe habits now?

What are the rules?

This curriculum is designed for communities with moderate to high levels of firearms ownership and engagement in the shooting sports (more on this below). In order to serve our communities with relevant and effective training, we offer two sets of rules: One set for if kids find or see a gun without your supervision, and another set of rules in case, as they get older, you or another adult invites them to learn to handle or shoot a gun (or if they find themselves in that situation when they’re an adult):

Unsupervised rules

• If you find or see a real gun, don’t touch.
• If another kid is touching or playing with a real gun, leave and tell an adult.
• (We give some additional messaging to encourage kids to let adults around them know if they find a gun that they think is out of place – see below for an explanation of our approach.)

Standard rules of gun safety (for adult supervision)

• Treat all guns like they’re always loaded.
• “Muzzle Direction”: Never point a gun at anything it wouldn’t be OK to put a bullet hole into.
• Keep your finger off the trigger unless you’ve decided to shoot.
• Always wear good eye and ear protection around shooting.

How can I use this curriculum?

We hope you’ll review this curriculum with your child, and with other members of the family, and make these guns safety rules the gold standard for kids in your care. In our curriculum, we describe two sets of rules (as you saw above), and we say in the training that the safety rules we teach are the same for everyone, all the way from kids who are just learning to shoot, through to the top level competitors in the world. That’s not an exaggeration, at least in the case of the safe gun handling rules we teach – the basics of treating guns as if they’re loaded, not pointing them at other people or yourself, and keeping your finger away from the trigger are core to every shooting discipline, from hunting to the shotgun sports to police and military training to action pistol and rifle competitions – people in every corner of the shooting sports world know and follow these same rules. As a result, any injuries typically involve people breaking all the rules simultaneously.

Safe firearm storage is, of course, a critical responsibility of every gun owner, just as everyone with a driver’s license is responsible to drive sober, at reasonable speeds, and with full attention to the road. In other words, it’s an important standard to live by, but we can’t assume it’s always successfully implemented. In the case of car crashes, we use car seats, seatbelts, and crash-tested vehicles to secure our kids. For guns that kids may come across, the protection is something they carry with them – it’s their knowledge of gun safety.

So, we encourage you to store firearms safely, and we respect your ability to determine what that means for your home and family. And despite your own commitment to safe firearm storage, we also encourage you to review the safety rules and this curriculum occasionally with your child. Put a hypothetical scenario like the one from this training to your child (e.g. “What would you do if you found a real gun at a friend’s house?”), and feel free to exceed our standards if it’s relevant to your situation. (For example, “If you ever see a gun other than grandpa’s rifles in his gun case, you have to come tell me or another adult right away.”)

If it’s helpful and relevant to your child, we also detail a muzzle direction exercise and discussion (below)if you’d like to help strengthen your child’s understanding of muzzle direction from this curriculum.

Why do we teach these rules?

This curriculum is designed specifically for communities with higher-than-average rates of gun ownership and engagement in the shooting sports. In such communities (including our own!), we face three truths about kids and guns:

1. It’s likely that most kids could encounter a gun at some time during their youth.
2. Some kids see guns frequently, such as hanging above a mantle or in a gun cabinet at home or in a relative’s home.
3. Kids in communities like ours are more likely than their peers in other places to be invited to handle or shoot guns, either as a child or later in life as an adult.

We recognize that there’s a wide range of opinions about these truths, but for the purpose of safety training, each of these truths deserves some attention in what we teach kids about guns at this age.

First, kids should never touch guns without adult supervision, period. That’s the core message of Gun Sense for Kids – students need to develop the sense never to touch guns that they come across when they’re by themselves or while playing with friends, whether they see guns regularly or not.

However, many national-level curricula on gun safety for kids miss the important cultural truth above (#2): Some kids see guns regularly. If we use a one-size-fits-all approach and tell kids to go find an adult every time they see a gun, it tells those kids who see guns frequently that the message isn’t for them. They realize, just as you do, how impractical it is to run and tell Mom every time they enter the living room and see a rifle hanging over the fireplace. As a result, these kids internalize that the entire enterprise of learning about gun safety just doesn’t pertain to them, even though they will probably have many more opportunities to apply gun safety knowledge than their peers with little or no exposure to guns.

Regarding the rules for safe gun handling: We want to ensure that everyone in our communities is aware of the industry-standard rules of safe gun handling, even if they never expect to handle a gun personally. There are lots of good reasons to know these rules, even if only to identify when someone else is being unsafe with a gun. Even if you don’t expect your child to ever touch or handle a gun later in life, having an innate understanding of gun safety is valuable.

Finally, we also hope to propagate the understanding that using eye and ear protection is a fundamental part of gun safety when any shooting is happening, and that some items like air rifles and BB guns may not be real guns, but we should know how to treat them, and we should treat them essentially like real guns.

Why don’t we teach Rule 4 as “Know your target and beyond”? This is a perfectly fine rule, and you should feel free to tell your child about it. However, with limited time and attention, we chose to get messaging about eye and ear protection in front of kids and families instead. Knowing your target and beyond is more critical in some shooting scenarios than others, requires a more nuanced explanation, and only pertains to the person shooting; whereas eye and ear protection pertain to everyone nearby, and to nearly all shooting contexts, so we choose to prioritize that message.

Muzzle Direction Exercise

Below, you’ll find a description of a discussion and hands-on exercise you can use to help establish the idea of muzzle direction. This exercise is geared towards kids who are likely to handle a gun someday, but can certainly be done with any kid.

Part 1: Explain what’s OK to point at.

In Gun Sense for Kids, we describe the muzzle direction rule this way: “Never point the muzzle at anything it wouldn’t be OK to put a bullet hole in.” Obviously, this phrase is intuitive, but could use some explanation. We suggest that you explain to your child that you obviously don’t want them to make holes in a tree or the floor or ceiling, but that “OK” in this case means something different – the idea is to not put bullet holes in people (or pets; or any animals, if you prefer), and by comparison, putting a hole in the floor or a tree is no big deal if were an accident. Answer any questions, even the obnoxious, hair-splitting ones – this is your child engaging with the concept, which is good.

Part 2: Critique me!

Next, find any object that can stand in for a gun. A toy gun, a stick, a pencil, or even your “finger gun” is just fine. Tell your child that you’ll demonstrate first, and they should watch and tell you if you’re getting close to something that it’s not ok to point your “muzzle” at. Point your “gun” around a bit, slowly, and let your child critique you. Most kids quite happily accept the chance to critique you – just wait till the teen years.

The “right answer” is for them to stop you whenever your “muzzle” points at, or even ever so briefly sweeps across, any part of a person (or when it gets close to doing so). They also learned in the training that things like buildings or cars that might contain people are also off-limits.

If your child stops you from pointing your “gun” at certain inanimate objects, that’s not a problem, even though it doesn’t quite match the training – it means they’re sensitive to where the muzzle is pointing, which is great! Ask them why you shouldn’t point your muzzle where they told you not to. Their favorite piece of technology, for example, might be a good test subject. Use this to spark discussion about safety topics in general – that things can be replaced, but people (and, if you prefer, pets or animals) can’t.

Part 3: Practice.

Now, it’s time to have your child take on the “gun” and keep it pointed in a safe direction. Before giving them the “gun”, establish a goal: “Now I’m going to give you the gun, and your goal is to walk into the other room, all the way to the other door, and then back to me without ever pointing the muzzle in an unsafe place.” Only after the goal is established should you hand over the “gun” – otherwise, there’s an awkward period of waiting for direction that can be ripe for distraction. Go with them, and stop them immediately if there’s a muzzle direction error – don’t wait to do a critique when the exercise is over.