PA Bill Number: HB2235
Title: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ...
Description: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ... ...
Last Action: Referred to LABOR AND INDUSTRY
Last Action Date: Apr 25, 2024
How We're Taught About Guns :: 04/06/2016
It is a common sense belief that the pervasiveness of violence in media can desensitize us to violence in society and surely must influence impressionable youth. Perhaps because of that, our entertainment-industrial complex regularly reports studies telling us that “the evidence just isn’t there”—to “move on, nothing to see here”.
Then how can the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry find it “quite compelling that children’s exposure to media violence plays an important role in the etiology of violent behavior”?
It may be impossible to prove a cause and effect relationship of exposure to depictions of violence on the frequency of violent crimes. We couldn’t raise hundreds of children watching only Peckinpah and Tarantino movies in order to compare their adult rates of violence to those raised on nothing but Disney and Pixar animations.
Yet it’s perfectly obvious that this matters. Adam Lanza’s life goals weren’t enhanced by the hours he spent locked in his room playing violent video games. And we do know that children who are abused are much more likely to grow up to abuse others, that people copy celebrity suicides and teens are more suicidal after acquaintances suicide.
Malcolm Gladwell suggests that repeated school shootings by students could be understood as serially motivated by prior ones, as sort of a “slow-motion, ever evolving riot”. In his thinking, the readiest aggressors with the lowest thresholds for violence began them but their influence recruits others whose higher thresholds are breached and they then join in this anti-social group identification.
Of course, the entertainment industry is filled with rich and powerful people who are nearly all anti-gun—for us, not for their own expensive private security. (Maybe there’s a reason that “plutocracy” rhymes with “hypocrisy”.)
How often do you watch a drama in which a private gun owner was the hero, saving the day by using his sidearm to defend innocent life? Far less often than it actually happens, that’s for sure.
This is an industry that has, since 2000, published a Firearm Depiction Tip Sheet to guide production staff in how to show firearms in the most undesirable ways. It goes to “showrunners, development executives, writers, producers and directors in film and television” and hundreds more in all stages of television show development.
It advises that “all types of programming. . . can find an angle of the [‘gun violence’] issue that will appeal to their audience”. Unsurprisingly, this work is funded by The Joyce Foundation, with input from all the usual anti-gun suspects (the Brady Campaign, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Million Mom March, the Violence Policy Center and The Annenberg Foundation).
According to NRA-ILA’s report, “of the more than 30 ‘suggestions’. . .the vast majority seek to portray legitimate firearm ownership as destructive and dangerous.” These include people “being too frozen in fear” to use their guns, “being overpowered by the attacker who then uses the gun against him”, “feeling less safe. . .when they find their neighbors becoming increasingly armed”, and finding “that having guns in the house may actually increase the possibility of home invasion robbery.”
You can read more of these at The Daily Caller, where Dan Griffin broke the story. But you couldn’t read them on the Entertainment Industries Council website after that. Once their “suggestions” became public knowledge, the site and page became unavailable. (As of March 23, the page and site were again accessible.)
The most interesting aspect of this, to return to our opening question, may be that we should believe that “entertainment. . .may influence real-life decisions and beliefs” (i.e., actions). But. . .but. . .haven’t they always told us that their violent stories just mirror life, they don’t actually influence anyone or promote the behaviors shown?!
The entertainment industry is using its power—repeatedly and insistently, though subtly—to try to normalize our feeling anxious and fearful about firearms. But then couldn’t similar approaches foster the development of real gun sense and safety?
Part 2:
Last week in Part 1 we discussed the hypocrisy that the anti-gun entertainment industry shows about the influence of its productions on viewers’ behavior. It has always denied that its marketing of graphic violence affects viewers’ propensity to act violently.
Yet one of its trade associations, the Entertainment Industry Council, urges members to use anti-gun plot elements because, as it says, “entertainment. . .may influence real-life decisions and beliefs”.
Role modeling, in real and pretend life, has great influence on individuals’ future behavior, most of all during child and adolescent development. Children learn the most from observing the important adults in their lives, usually their parents (watch those driving habits!), next most (socially, at any rate) from peers and then, more formally, from schooling.
How do they learn about firearms? From film, TV and video game examples if there is no actual experience. It’s no favor to grow up believing that bullets always miss you but always hit your targets, that fingers stay on triggers at all times, and that shooting someone means either inflicting only a “flesh wound” or just wastes an immediately resurrected avatar.
In January 2014 ABC’s 20/20 televised a frequently referenced special called Young Guns. In it, 44 young children were observed in small groups in a room where real (unloaded) guns were placed among their toys. Unsurprisingly, almost all picked them up to play with, often pretending to shoot at one other or at themselves.
Host Diane Sawyer explained that “nearly all. . . had been taught ‘don’t touch a gun and tell an adult’. . .we took half of them to reinforce that message. The St. Petersburg police gave a safety class and they looked at a popular video from the NRA, ‘Eddie Eagle’. . .Then after a few days” more, the experiment took place.
Of four groups of two boys together shown, two sets would not touch the guns they found; the other two duos egged each other on to pick them up. They looked down the barrels and pointed them at each other. So there it is, proof that educating kids accomplishes nothing, and that only removing guns from their awareness can save them. . ?
Not so fast. Of fourteen girls tested, only one touched a gun. And in two of three other groups of boys, older and wiser 10-year-olds stopped their younger friends from touching them. Those younger friends were just 5 years old. Overall, 18 of 30 boys without the single days-old gun safety teaching touched them, while only 9 of 24 who’d been taught not to touch did.
In a moving plot line, two boys had never been allowed to see guns or violent media, so had no awareness of what they can do. Their mothers were terrified by their sons’ interest. A third mother had told her son about the injuries from gunfire she dealt with in the operating room. Her son touched anyway, and mostly regretted his mother knowing. Another mother (the wife of a law officer) with more insight said “For these guys, guns are about the same seriousness as crickets, frogs and cookies.”
But one child aptly questioned: “Why was the gun even in here?”. . .just before the show segued into anecdotes about children tragically, accidentally killed by guns left dangerously accessible.
In a separate article, the psychologist adviser, Marjorie Sanfilippo, avers that the study was “about the responsibilities that come with [the RKBA]. This [was] about adults’ responsibility to keep children safe.” Then, of course, adding that “the right of children to live without fear and danger supersedes a Constitutional right to bear arms.” No bias there, eh?
These details can all be viewed in the special but there’s a reason to go over them. Their cumulative effect is to make viewers fear that guns are lying around everywhere—and indeed there are easily 300 million of them somewhere in more than 1/3 of American households. Other critics have also highlighted the skewed attitude in this show-job.
Sawyer did not report that those accidents were responsible for only 124 deaths of children under 15 years old in 2013. Or that accidental deaths by drowning, burning and automobiles each vastly outnumber those from shootings in this age group. Or that for any gun accident there are specific adults responsible for their choices about how to manage firearms and children.
They certainly didn’t point out the most important things their cursory “experiment” showed.
Even the brief, and for some children unique, episode of instruction reduced the incidence of boys handling guns by nearly half, from 60% to 38%. For research interested in injury prevention, that would be the headline leading to hopeful further study.
The 5-year-olds shown were the most impulsive, but their 10 year old companions were well able to keep away. They even intervened to keep the younger ones safe. And sheltering these children from depictions of guns did nothing to protect them from their innate curiosity about the world, including firearms.
Since Young Guns, there have been more instructive demonstrations of the protective value of education. In separate reports, television stations and local police in Waterloo, Iowa and in Fairway, Kansas did similar tests earlier this year.
. . .which we’ll review, along with the right ways to raise gun-safe children, next week in Part 3.
Part 3:
In Part 1, we discussed the entertainment industry’s hypocrisy, claiming that its violent productions don’t influence behavior while using the same media to influence viewers against gun ownership.
Part 2 reviewed a blatant example that aired 2 years ago, Young Guns, that purported to show that children cannot reliably grasp the danger of playing with real-seeming guns. Of course, it was also a poor demonstration of how to teach kids.
The hysteria over guns in the home is driven by anti-gun activists whose goals are furthered the more people fear. The truth is far different. The number of accidental shooting deaths of children, whether considered up to age 10 or age 15, are very few (less than 50 or just over 100, respectively), especially considering the 300 million plus firearms in 60-70 million households across the United States.
Each death is a terrible tragedy, but most of those accidents occur at the hands of males with criminal records and every one could be prevented, unlike most intentional homicides and suicides. (Keeping your children away from criminals is a good idea for many reasons.)
Guard your children against accidental fires, drowning and motor vehicles—child death rates for each of these far exceed that risk from firearms. We do that by teaching them what to do about a fire and how to swim. Even though automobile accidents kill nearly 60 times as many people as do gun accidents, we don’t lock up car keys (or cars) one place and fuel separately. We establish over time that they are not to misuse the accessibility of our vehicles without education and permission—and that works.
Responsible, gun-safe young people are raised the same way—with good parenting, consistently teaching and role modeling safe, healthy behaviors. “Consistently” here means providing the right messages and being persistent throughout childhood in delivering those messages.
Earlier this year, there were further joint efforts by television stations, law enforcement and schools to understand what can better promote safe behavior by children who encounter guns unsupervised. They should have received more attention, because they were more realistic situations than Young Guns staged in St. Petersburg, Florida.
In Waterloo, Iowa, among 9 children ages 3 to 7, things started much as in St. Petersburg. With no prior instruction, all the kids played with the guns they found. Then the police office entered, took the guns, and talked with the children about the right things to do when they find a firearm.
On repeating the exercise, the child who first found it “backs away from it and runs to tell his mom.” Authoritative instruction matters most when given at a ‘teachable moment’, when children are in the midst of relevant activity (not days before, like in Young Guns).
A Fairway, Kansas station reported that of 8 children from pre-K through kindergarten, six almost immediately played with the gun, pointing it heedlessly at anyone and pulling the trigger. As this police officer said, “Everything is a toy in their world. Unless we educate them and let them know sometimes it’s not.” The point here is that, untutored, kids can show no more than natural, age-appropriate behaviors. Expecting self-restraint by 5 year olds alone in a room with something tempting is completely unrealistic.
But as reported, there were “two children who didn’t touch the weapon. . .the ones whose families have guns in their homes and had already talked to them about how dangerous they are.” In other words, responsible gun owners raise responsible children by teaching them the rules and setting clear expectations as they grow up. These 6-years-olds, from families comfortable and careful with guns, respected them.
Cambria County, Pennsylvania, is a rural school district in which an estimated 80% of homeowners own firearms. It has been providing firearm safety education, called GunStop, to kindergarten and 3rd grade students for the past 20 years. Videos used include NRA’s Eddie Eagle program (“Stop! Don’t touch. Leave the area. Find an adult.”) and McGruff the Crime Dog (crime awareness).
The program teaches children about conflict resolution as well as what to do when encountering a firearm on their own. Parents may choose for their children to participate or not, as well as to participate themselves with their children.
Gun Safety for Kids & Toddlers by Sarah Carling is a real-life description of one mother’s thinking about how to teach her children, ideas which are realized in Cambria County’s curriculum. There are also unforeseen long term benefits for youth experience with firearms. According to a Department of Justice-funded study (page 18), “boys who own legal firearms. . . have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than non-owners of guns.”
Child development is not just about avoiding bad outcomes, but is also for them to discover and try new things and expand their limits. Learning marksmanship can be an excellent way for young people to develop patience, self-discipline, focus and coordination. It’s an activity with no gender dominance, in which one can compete with others or just with oneself.
NSSF’s Project ChildSafe video lays it all out. It’s narrated by Julie Golob, a mother who knows guns as a record-setting national and international shooting champion. Teach them the Eddie Eagle rules from the beginning. As they become old enough, “demystify” firearms by demonstrating yours and set “an example with your own safe handling and proper storage of guns”. Teach them the NRA Gun Safety Rules of responsible gun handling, being sure they always see you invariably following them yourself. Then take them shooting.
Kids learn by example and by instruction, and always require repetition. This occurs naturally regarding firearms in families who own and use guns, but not at all in those who avoid or reject them. Gun-savvy parents who handle firearms responsibly naturally beget offspring who do too.
Keeping children ignorant about guns just increases their likelihood of doing the wrong thing and risking death when (not, in our society, if) they encounter firearms. As I’ve said before: Teach safety, not ignorance.
— Robert B. Young, MD is a psychiatrist practicing in Pittsford, NY, an associate clinical professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.
