Teaching safety to kids--very upsetting to the Gun Guys

As soon as I read this article about a program in Alaska to teach 6th graders about gun safety, I knew the Gun Guys would chime in with their standard hysterical indignation. They didn't disappoint me. In fact, they call the idea "almost unthinkable" (if that idea is even close to "unthinkable," perhaps that says more about the Gun Guys' ability to think than it does about the idea):

. . . one Alaska school is doing the almost unthinkable: putting firearms in students’ hands.

The idea behind such a program is to teach the kids basic safety principles, such as muzzle discipline, that guns are to always be considered loaded, etc. In a place like Alaska, where guns are an integral part of everyday life, it just makes sense to give kids some training about how to handle a gun safely.

The Gun Guys, of course, love to argue that there is no such thing as gun safety (another term, like gun rights, that they rarely use without quotation marks). To "prove" this point, they usually refer to accounts of trained, experienced gun handlers doing something stupid, and accidentally shooting themselves or someone else. What they don't mention is that by this "logic," everytime an experienced driver crashes, we have proof that cars are a deadly menace. Yes--guns can be unforgiving of carelessness or stupidity, but so can innumerable other things that people use. That is precisely why safety training is so vital.

Fear and ignorance are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the currency in which the Gun Guys, and all the rest of the anti-gun extremists, conduct their business.