It's about education, not control

I've actually been trying to avoid this matter, since even I realize it's a long-dead horse, but I've seen one too many people here on ProgressiveU that seem to think gun control is the only way to go to leave it alone any longer. It seems that a lot of people that are for gun control think that even touching a gun is going to make a person go on a rampant shooting spree or turn someone into a serial killer. It's that kind of ignorance and beligerent fear that's so dangerous to everyone.

A little history about myself

I originally grew up in a suberb of Cleveland, OH. The area was the typical urban/suburban area where guns were seen as a taboo at best and an evil at worst. Whether or not there were laws banning guns or "weapon free zones" in that area at the time, I don't know. I do know that guns weren't something many people owned and the physical tools themselves were almost non-existent.

The area was, however, not one you'd really want to be in at night and alone. Break-ins, mugging, and other general petty crime was common. You'd also hear about the occasional armed assault or shooting or whatever.

When I was about 10, I moved to a rural part of Western Pennsylvania. We're talking the middle of nowhere in the middle of the National Forest, where towns were 15 miles apart and the nearest big city (in this case, Erie or Pittsburgh) was two hours away.

The area is a big hunting area. So big, in fact, that kids had the opening day of deer season off because the school district knew that no one would be in school anyway. Part of the sixth grade cirriculum was a week-long hunter's safety course in the fall, just before their first deer season (the age to get a hunting permit in Pennsylvania is 12 years old). In that area, hunting wasn't just a sport, it was a way of life. And for a lot of people, the meat they got from hunting was the staple of their diet.

It was there that I learned to respect guns and learned to use them as the tools they are. Though I never hunted myself, I respected the fact that they were tools and weren't toys, and above all, weren't the evil force a lot of people in the cities make them out to be. I still learned how to handle and shoot one, as well as proper care and storage of rifles and shotguns.

After I graduated high school, I moved to Columbus, OH, for college. The city of Columbus is one of the many cities where guns are banned in parts of the area. Downtown, for example, you cannot carry guns into any building. Some of the suburbs/municiples, if I recall correctly, are completely gun-free. The first week I was there, the news reported the finding of a dead body next to the highway less than half a mile from where I lived. There is generally a shooting or murder or some other gun-related crime at least once a month. I've stopped watching the local news because it's generally pretty much the same thing.

So...what's your point?

The people in the rural town that I lived in had, typically, 2-4 children and enough firearms (including shotguns, high powered rifles, hand guns, bows, and muzzle loaders) to arm a small batallion per household. Yet none of my schoolmates or their brothers or sisters have even been killed or injured because of guns (actually, the roads are far more dangerous than even a room full of guns in that area).

Now, why is that? Because they were educated about guns from a very young age. They were taught that guns were not toys, but tools, and that they were not to be touched unless an adult is around. They were also around them all the time. To kids in these rural areas, guns are as much a part of their life as kitchen utensils. Once they got old enough (typically 7 or 8), they generally got to go to the shooting range and learn how to handle and shoot a gun (my step dad always let me use the .22 caliber rifle, while my younger sisters generally used a smaller gun we called the chipmunk gun since they were younger).

The key here is the knowledge of the tools. A knife, a tool used for cutting things so it is, by nature, sharp, is dangerous, even lethal, in the wrong hands, be they ignorant or malicious (or both). The area's gun-related crime rate is next to nothing, despite the fact that the firearm to person ratio (including children) is roughly 2:1, because they know the proper handling and care of firearms and respect the tools as potentially dangerous, much in the same way they are taught that knives can be potentially dangerous and they have to learn to respect them.

In contrast, my classmates in Ohio probably never laid eyes on a firearm other than on a cop, in the movies, or in those "take a bite out of crime" commercials, all of which depicted them as something taboo or just out of reach (and that's probably all that was ever told to them about firearms). In the suburbs, guns are one of those things that "just aren't proper to talk about." That, of course, makes them all the more tempting, because they're a mystery.