Study: Kids ignore gun-safety ed

CHILDREN WHO attend gun safety programs don’t remember what they learn and often ignore instructors’ lessons when faced with a real weapon, researchers at the Rutgers School of Nursing found.

The study, published in the journal Health Promotion Practice, looked at data from 10 previous papers on gun safety strategies for 4- to 9-year-old kids and saw that unsupervised children do not stay away from firearms, regardless of participation in a safety program.

“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,” the study’s coauthor, Cheryl Holly, told Rutgers Today.

The Rutgers team discovered that, in alarming conjunction with children’s seeming disregard for gun rules, about 85% of rifle or handgun-owning parents didn’t practice what the study considered “safe gun storage.” The review also found that 72% of those mothers and fathers believed that their small children knew the difference between a toy gun and a real one.