Kids don't retain safety skills with firearms in a real-world scenario
Rutgers University
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.
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.
"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 the perspective of children who were
accessing guns in their homes and accidentally shooting themselves, parents and
siblings," she said. "We wanted to see what educational strategies
teachers and communities are using to teach gun safety to children, and how
effective they really are."
Gun
safety training is essential, Holly said, because children in the United States
have more access to guns than those in other developed countries and because
most unintentional shooting deaths by children occur in their homes or at the
residence of a friend or relative.
Firearm injuries are the third-leading cause
of death for all children aged 1 to 17 and are responsible for thousands of
children being treated for open wounds, fractures and brain and spinal
injuries. In addition, children who witness firearm injury can experience
psychological effects, such as fear, anxiety and elevated stress.
"Although
programs that used active learning strategies, such as modeling, simulation or
feedback, were slightly more effective at teaching gun-safety skills than
programs that handed out literature, the majority still failed to teach the
children to put what they learned into practice," said Sallie Porter,
assistant professor at the School of Nursing, who co-authored the study with
Holly. "Children are very curious -- especially about things that they
have been warned not to handle."
Mary
Kamienski, a professor at the School of Nursing, and alumna Aubrianne Lim, a
registered nurse at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, also contributed to the
study.
The
researchers concluded that safe gun storage is the best way to protect children
and adolescents from gun injuries. Their advice: Lock the guns up and make sure
children cannot get the key or learn the access code, or better yet have a gun
free-home.
"Gun
safety education has value, but parents should not be complacent and feel
comfortable that skills training alone will truly prevent their child from
handling a gun," Porter said. "Parents often overestimate their
children's cognitive abilities and underestimate their physical abilities. They
are wrong to think that their 4-year-old can't climb to reach the gun safe or
that their child is developmentally mature enough to know not to handle a
gun."
