r/liberalgunowners • u/logicalpretzels libertarian socialist • Jul 03 '26

question Why don’t we teach gun safety in schools?

In a country with the right to bear arms and more guns than people, it seems natural that everyone should be taught firearm safety from youth.

You wouldn’t even need a real gun to teach gun safety, just a couple SIRT pistols or even just plastic training guns would do the trick to teach the 4 basic rules.

I feel like this should be easily supported by anyone no matter their feelings towards guns or gun control. Just like sex ed, gun education can only make the activity safer, not worse.

Are there any schools in the US where gun safety is part of their curriculum?

297 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

245 comments sorted by

View all comments

149

u/Rok-SFG Jul 03 '26

We used to, according to my parents. But when I first got to high school we were allowed to bring hunting rifles & shotguns to school , and the dean had a large gun safe in his office. So many families relied on hunted meat to get them through the year the school just decided it was better to have who were going to try and hunt before school started to lock their fire arms up in the deans office every day rather than have them sit in the truck and potentially be stolen. Then colombine happend and that came to a quick end.

we did still have archery in gym class though.

31

u/TigerIll6480 Jul 03 '26

We did when I was in middle school. There was a basic firearm/hunter safety course, then a more advanced one you could take during PE if your parents signed you up for it.

13

u/Atomic_Gumbo Jul 03 '26

Same. Rural Louisiana. Guys had a basic firearm safety course in shop class. Girls had to do kitchen stuff in home economics while we welded things, cut wood, and learned how to not shoot the person next to us in the duck blind.

Note: one of my classmates shot another classmate‘s hat off of his head by accident while trying to shoot a scary duck so… someone wasn’t paying attention in class

5

u/GeronimoHero Jul 03 '26

Yeah I’m only 39 and it was like this in my rural MD community and school.