I am so excited! My kids are finally old enough that I can teach them how to shoot a gun! I have been waiting for this for years!
What I found surprising was how nervous I was for the kids safety the first time we went shooting. I am very comfortable around guns. The safety procedures come second nature to me. However, for them it was all new. Kids can be unpredictable.....
So before we started I drilled into them a few basic rules. I tried not to be too complex, they are kids after all. These are what I cam up with:
1. Keep your finger off the trigger.
I simply taught them to not touch the trigger until they were looking down the sights. I was expecting this to be one of the hard ones to follow, but they caught right on.
2. Never point the gun at anyone.
This was the hard one. Kids are naturally oblivious to anyone and everything around them. Keeping a gun safely pointed is tough for even most adults I've taught, so this does not come as a surprise.
What ended up helping was when I told them to imagine a laser beam shooting out of the barrel that cut anyone it touched in half. Being Star Wars fans, this game caught on quite well with them.
3. Pretend the gun is always loaded.
This was another easy one. They don't know enough to tell if it is loaded or not anyway, so treating it as if it was always loaded came fairly naturally.
Using these simple three rules, and going over them religiously, has kept all of us safe and let us enjoy the process without worry.
In Part 2 I am going to talk about the gun I chose to use when teaching them, and why I chose it.
Would you like to see a video of our first shooting session? Here it is! (The shooting is at the end of the video.)
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