A Gun Is Not Fun
Thoughts on gun safety for kids
The Wake Forest Center for Literacy Education is hosting its first annual Visiting Scholars Speaker Series and Community Networking Conference on Monday, March 24, 2025 from 4:00-8:00 pm. The event is free and open to the public.
The theme of this year’s conference is “A Gun is Not Fun: Strategies to Keep Children Safe from Gun Violence.” Speakers will engage in conversation about gun violence prevention strategies with a specific focus on our community’s youngest learners.
I will be among the speakers, so save the date if you are in the area. I don’t think it will be recorded, alas.
I’m not sure what I will contribute to this conversation, but my initial reaction is that the book's title and the conference’s theme are problematic.
In a nation of 90 million gun owners and 400 million guns, we need to teach gun safety. And gun safety education certainly needs to be age-appropriate. In this respect, the action ideas in A Gun is Not Fun are similar to the NRA’s Eddie Eagle:
“If you see a gun run. Tell a grown-up, call 9-1-1.”
“If you see a gun: Stop! Don't touch. Run away. Tell a grown-up.”
It is not fun for an untrained child to come across an unsupervised gun. But I sense that the author’s point goes beyond this limited circumstance and wants to say that guns generally are not fun.
To me, that’s a problem. Because guns are fun. This is the first of five lessons I conclude my Gun Curious book with. I quote Trae Crowder’s Liberal Redneck Manifesto there: “The simple fact of guns is that they’re fun as shit.” I rehearse the gun culture idiom: There’s no such thing as an anti-gun gun range. Googling “guns are fun” brings up an article in GQ magazine from 2012 titled: Why "Gun Control" Isn't Working: Because Guns Are Fun, And Control Is Not. In his book Gun Guys: A Road Trip, Dan Baum called guns “Barbie for men.” And so on.
Of course, guns are also lethal tools. As they say at Open Source Defense, that’s a feature, not a bug. Firearms-related harms are not fun. The point of William Electric Black’s book and the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program is to reduce accidental gun injuries and deaths among children. That is an unequivocally good thing.
And thanks to efforts by the NRA and other firearms educators/trainers, accidental firearms deaths have been declining for decades now (see Open Source Defense 314: Safety is good actually). Still, as Derek LeBlanc of the Kids S.A.F.E. Foundation says, “ZERO firearm accidents is the only acceptable goal!!”
In a recent webinar I did with the UConn ARMS Center, one of the attendees asked me about firearm-related accidental deaths among children. I didn’t have the data handy, but I know it is more than zero.
It turns out that about 64 children aged 1-12 have died by unintentional firearm injury per year over the past six years. This figure is based on a table on deaths by cause for children ages 1-12 my friend Tovis created using CDC Wonder data from 2018-2023.
64 unintentional firearm deaths is 64 more than zero — that is, far too many. But for unintentional deaths, children aged 1-12 are almost ten times more likely to die by drowning than by firearm.
Like guns, playing in water is fun. Like guns, playing in water is dangerous. That’s why we teach children to swim, even at ages when we would never let them swim unsupervised. We want them to be safe in water, not safe from water.
Another clear conclusion we can draw from the table Tovis sent me is that, unlike drowning or motor vehicle deaths, most gun deaths are intentional. This is even more true of adults, where suicides (58% of gun deaths in 2023) and homicides (38% of gun deaths) far surpass unintentional gun deaths (fewer than 500 annually).
In the hands of someone who intends to harm themself or another person, a gun is most definitely not fun.
I continue to be unable to wrap my head around the fact that "every death of one too many" is a criteria that is applied *only* to firearms. For motor vehicles, swimming pools, etc. the same people accept that, while we should try to minimize injury (especially fatal injury), there's a risk of injury that just comes with the potentially dangerous nature of the object and we can't entirely eradicate it. Still, nobody urges "a pool is not cool."
The GQ writer has the honesty to admit that he keeps a TV because he enjoys having one, even though it would be better for his kids if he got rid of it. The same applies to cars and swimming pools, one can only assume.
I hope this blog post is the main part of the discussion you will have at this conference. "A Gun Is Not Fun" simply doesn't make any real world sense, as opposed to making sense in a Progressive ideological bubble where guns = pathology. Toy guns have been big sellers. Somewhere, there is a pic of me as a little kid having festooned myself with my Christmas gift: that U.S. Invader Set, complete with (toy) 1911 and Thompson. Then there is A Christmas Story, with Ralphie's Red Ryder (my B.B. gun Christmas gift as a kid was the Daisy Spittin' Image; take that, Ralphie!). And youth shooting activities, formal and informal, under supervision.
Vision Zero is a good "ultimate goal" in traffic and other design analysis, where we kill people, as with guns or swimming pools. You admittedly never get to zero, because this is not a perfect world, but you use the idea as guidance. But having worked traffic safety issues for three decades, I can tell you that getting adults to drive safely and traffic engineers to design safer roads has been....downright Sisyphean. Fact is, people don't like driving the speed limit or having roads traffic calmed because they put their lead foot above the interests of vulnerable users.
You are right: we need to teach kids to be safe in a world where there are guns around, just as we teach them to be safe in a world where water is around, because both are around. But it falls on parents and other supervisors to teach and enforce this, as kids don't get birthed as fully functional adults.