^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com September 27, 2013}

I don’t need to produce a list of mass shootings that have occurred in America over the past few years – they’ve been reported on plenty. Another one occurred in my home town this week, in which a road rage incident wound up with somebody getting shot six times.

I don’t really find discussions of gun control to be productive, since each side of the debate tends to seek the shelter of the rhetoric and refuses to give ground to the other side. My personal opinion is that stopping these shootings will require a major cultural and societal change, and that’s not going to happen as long as people split the issue along political party lines.

I do think about how I want my kids to see guns. I live in Vermont, and we happen to have a lot of guns up here, mostly because we love our hunting. My son is not into guns right now, but he has a cousin who turns everything into a gun. I’m not going to be the guy that tells kids they can’t play war, cops and robbers, or whatever gun-related games they want to play. So that leaves the question: how am I going to make sure my kids respect the danger guns represent?

The answer, as with most things, boils down to a matter of education.

There are certain elements of gun safety that far too many people ignore but that should be drilled into anybody who wants to own a gun. Every gun is loaded, even when it’s not. Never point a gun at something you don’t intend to kill. Always make sure you know exactly what you’re aiming at. (EDIT: And, as pointed out by my friend Beth, never put your finger on the trigger unless you’re ready to shoot.)

I learned all these things through a hunter’s safety course. The course ended with the police officer who was teaching it taking us each one by one through an obstacle course with a BB gun. Two targets had hunters nearby who might have been hit if you fired. One target was concealed, and if you fired then you had just shot a doe rather than a buck. At one point I got reprimanded because I was accidentally pointing my gun at the officer’s foot.

The training course was effective because it’s still in my head almost 20 years later. Of course, if I’m going to teach this to my kids then I need to show it to them in action, too. If I take them to a paintball course someday, I don’t get to wave my gun around like an idiot just because it’s got nonlethal ammo in it. A gun is a gun, and needs to be treated as such whatever the ammo may be. (That won’t stop me from firing at them once we’ve got our safety equipment on and the game has started, though!)

The steps to gun safety are simple, but they tend to get forgotten far too often. I’m familiar with at least two shootings in my area in which the assailant claimed that the gun malfunctioned or wouldn’t stop shooting. Both of those claims irritate the heck out of me because that’s a terrible defense. Whether or not the gun was functioning properly, those people aimed it at somebody. If they hadn’t wanted to kill their victims, they never should have aimed the weapon.

I have no grand vision of how to end gun violence in this country, but I do have the ability to teach my kids on my side. I can give them the facts about how to use a gun and hope that they listen.

For my own mental health, I can calm down a bit and remember that the amount of gun violence in America tends to be overhyped by the various media outlets we are inundated with every day. The number of mass shooting rates is on the rise, which is troubling. However, according to a Pew Research report earlier this year, the overall rate of gun violence in America is trending downward over the last 20 years.

Gun violence is on the rise in suicides, which make up about 60% of all gun deaths in America. That’s a reminder that depression and suicide is a big problem that many kids will have to face. Hopefully, one of the things we as a society will someday be able to do is help those who are dangerously ill before they decide to turn a gun on themselves or somebody else.

While the declining gun violence statistics in America provide me with a little hope for the future, I’d feel better about them if researchers had any idea as to why it’s decreasing. All researchers know is that gun crimes boomed in the 60s and 70s, then have been on a decline ever since. There are theories as to why this is the case, but no hard evidence yet to back up those theories.

So in the end, I’m left with my only real defense against the problems that my kids will face as they grow up: education. I’m going to teach my kids to respect guns and hope that they and others in their generation listen so the number of shootings in this country can continue to decrease.

_{Featured Image: Jean Sander}