Gun safety for kids
NZ childcare chain launches cut-out weapons, targets
One of New Zealand’s biggest childcare chains is launching cut-out guns and targets to teach gun-safety rules to preschoolers. Evolve Education, which runs 130 childcare centres plus the Porse and Au Pair Link home-based companies, says the gun-safety kit has been developed particularly for about 40 rural preschool centres in areas where hunting is common.
“This is very much around com- munities where little boys will go hunting with dad in the hunting season and it’s part of life,” said chief operating officer Fay Amaral.
But Dr Sarah Alexander of the early childhood advisory group Child Forum said she was shocked by the kit, which will be available to download free online internationally.
“For the first time in New Zealand we’ll have a large early childhood organisation that has declared itself to be pro-gun,” she said.
“It could be a potential publicity stunt for Evolve to get its name in the media, but it could backfire from families who are not pro-gun.”
Evolve had a “hot debut” on the NZX sharemarket in December 2014 with shares trading 8c above their list price of $1. But its share price has slumped to 54c, almost halving the company’s market value from $191 million to $97m.
Its gun-safety kit, which will be available at gunsafeforkids.com, includes targets for children to cut out, colour in and shoot at, colourful drawings of guns for children to cut out and stick on cardboard-box “gun safes”, toy gun licences and a cartoon book on gun-safety rules in childfriendly language. The materials include three rules:
“We never point toy guns at people, pets or ourselves”
“We only point toy guns at targets”
“Only grown-ups can open the gun safe”
Amaral said Evolve was asked to develop the kit by its Little Wonders childcare centres in South Canterbury and Otago.
Dr Annette Henderson, an Auckland University psychologist specialising in preschoolers who was asked by the Herald to review the kit, said the approach was ageappropriate.
“I think they are doing it in the right way, and I think that it works doing it with toys.”
But she said the kit did not explain the reason for the safety rules.