Gun safetyChildren often ignore what they learn at gun safety programs
Children who participate in gun safety programs often ignore what they learned when encountering a real firearm, according to a new study. The study found such programs do not reduce the likelihood that children will handle guns when they are unsupervised, that boys are more likely than girls to ignore gun-safety rules and that few studies exist of gun-safety programs for children beyond the fourth grade.
Children who participate in gun safety programs often ignore what they learned when encountering a real firearm, according to a Rutgers School of Nursing study.
The report, published recently in Health Promotion Practice, reviewed 10 studies on the effectiveness of strategies for teaching gun safety to children ages 4 to 9. The researchers found such programs do not reduce the likelihood that children will handle guns when they are unsupervised, that boys are more likely than girls to ignore gun-safety rules and that few studies exist of gun-safety programs for children beyond the fourth grade.
Rutgers says that included among the findings from previous studies is that 85 percent of gun-owning parents did not practice safe gun storage and 72 percent believed their young children could differentiate a toy gun from a real gun.
The gun safety training approaches studied included “just say no” in which authority figures tell children to stay away from guns; skills-building approaches, which teach children skills to resist touching guns; and knowledge-based programs in which children are provided with video or printed material about gun safety.
“Most of the studies evaluated knowledge-based learning in which children sit in a classroom and are shown videos or handed papers with activities or information to teach them rules to follow if they should come across a gun,” said study co-author Cheryl Holly, a professor at Rutgers School of Nursing. “The studies found that even children who initially followed the rules after the training did not use the safety skills they learned weeks later when placed in a room with a nonfunctional gun. This leads us to question if young children can retain the gun-safety skills they learn over time.”
Holly, co-director of the Northeast Institute for Evidence Synthesis and Translation, based at the School of Nursing, is a resident of Sandy Hook, Connecticut. She was prompted to study gun violence after the elementary school shooting in her community.
“We wanted to look at gun violence from
