Posted on 07/19/2002 7:35:22 AM PDT by Joe Brower
Report Finds Gun Safety Programs Fail To Protect Kids
BY HELEN RUMBELOW, THE WASHINGTON POST
Friday, July 19, 2002
Gun safety programs aimed at young people do not work and have done little to reduce the 20,000 children killed or injured by guns in the United States every year, a foundation report says.
Children's curiosity and teenagers' love of risks makes them extremely resistant to efforts to persuade them not to handle guns, such as the National Rifle Association's Eddie Eagle campaigns as well as programs by gun control advocates, it found.
In some cases these programs may have increased the appeal of guns, said the child health specialists who wrote, "Children, Youth and Gun Violence" for The Future of Children, a journal of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Instead, the easiest way to save young lives would be to make guns more "childproof" with built-in safety devices, although the industry has been slow to adopt these measures, the report said.
In the meantime, the report said, parents should become the new target of gun safety campaigns, because they leave guns around the house, loaded and unlocked. Parents don't take enough responsibility for gun safety because they overestimate the maturity of their children, it said.
The report claims to be the first to synthesize a wide-range of research into gun safety and children.
Two separate studies showed that children who received gun safety education were just as likely to play with a gun as children who had not had the training.
"The empirical evidence shows that these programs aimed at children are ineffective, and by telling children to say no we may even be increasing the allure," said Majorie Hardy, psychology professor at Eckard College in Florida and an author of the report.
Parents were highly resistant to education about safe storage of guns, she said, although experts were encouraged by the slow but steady success of parent education in campaigns such as seating children in the back of cars.
Stephen Teret, the director of the Center for Gun Law and the Public's Health at Johns Hopkins University and another author of the report, said many gun deaths could be prevented by simple safety features, such as an indicator that shows when a gun is loaded. Many teenage boys kill or injure each other by playing with guns they believe are empty.
Some parents worry that safeguards would limit their ability to defend themselves, he said, although research shows the family is much more at risk from the gun in the house than an intruder.
"This is a public health issue, like driving. We didn't just warn people about the risks of driving, we made cars safer," Teret said.
NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said the NRA could not comment because it had not studied the report. He defended the Eddie Eagle campaign: "It is widely taught to children and widely acclaimed and we're confident it is an effective program."
The National Shooting Sports Foundation said the decline in youth deaths and injuries in the last decade indicated education works. From 1993 to 1998, the firearms death rate for those under 20 declined by nearly 50 per cent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The Packard report "doesn't pass the reality test," said Paul Erhardt, a spokesman for the shooting foundation.
But yet state mandated sex education is the best solution to teen pregnancy, unwed mothers, etc..
Kellerman's "a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill friend or family than an unknown intruder" strikes again. Except that protection isn't only measured in dead bodies, and most of the friends and family killed are suicides, and many of the remainder are criminals killing each other in their homes. Even liar Kellerman himself retracted the number and corrected it to 22-to-1 - but the lower number isstill deceptive for the same reasons.
Lie, distort, mislead ... par for the course for, indeed, the very bread and butter of, gun grabbers.
Amazing, huh?
I love how they always say this - "leave guns lying around the house". I get the vision of one over there on the coffee table, two in the sink, another in the crib and a couple on the floor at the top of the stairs. You know, like real life.
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