Johanna Thomas, a social worker and gun safety advocate for Be SMART, is raising a 15-year-old and an 11-year-old in Fayetteville, Arkansas. There are three handguns in her home. Thomas keeps them in a safe in her bedroom closet that can only she and her husband can open, either with their fingerprints or with a code only they know.
“Firearms are locked and unloaded and our ammunition is stored in a separate safe that is controlled by an electronic keypad. Both safes are bolted into the shelving,” Thomas told HuffPost.
Of her two daughters, only the 15-year-old has handled a gun — under parental supervision at a firing range. The process was controlled and deliberate.
“As a family, we sat down and talked about if she felt ready to handle a firearm and if she even wanted to. She was interested, so my brother and husband took her to the range for her first lesson,” Thomas said.
“She only handles the firearms under the supervision of my husband or me and in a controlled environment, specifically an indoor or outdoor firing range, and only for sport.”
Thomas’ 11-year-old is “not ready,” she said, although she is aware of the guns and her sister’s trips to the firing range.
Thomas doesn’t worry about her children being harmed by the securely stored weapons in her home, but she fears what could happen when they are at other people’s houses.
“I do worry about my child coming into a situation in which another adult has not properly stored their firearm, and now that adult’s child has an unsupervised gun. It’s terrifying. I never depend on my children to not touch a gun, no matter how much I emphasize that they shouldn’t,” she said.
Whenever her children have friends over, Thomas discloses that she has secured weapons, along with information about pets, a swimming pool, alcohol and medications, and she expects other parents to reciprocate.
This normalization of guns can seem foreign to folks from the bluer parts of the country.
Ben, a father of two young daughters who asked to use a pseudonym for this article, was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, he said, “guns were not a part of life.” He did not know anyone who went hunting, and the only weapons he’d seen in person were “two non-operable guns from World War I that [my grandfather] got at a garage sale or something well before I was born that just sat up above his bar.” He had no gun education, and, had he taken any interest, Ben would have had to seek out that information on his own — which could have put him in a dangerous situation, such as another person showing him their gun.
Ben now lives in rural Minnesota, where hunting, both with guns and bows and arrows, is a regular part of life. “Children here, including my own, grow up knowing that hunting culture and hunting season is something that your family does,” he said. People there can’t comprehend why anyone would want to ban guns, just as people in California don’t understand why people would own them, he said. He also noted that Minnesota has background checks and other safety measures that some other states do not.
Ben’s weapons are stored in safes, separate from ammunition. He said his children do not know where they are kept, and are aware that they should never touch a gun and should alert an adult if they ever find one.
While he only rarely hunts and owns few weapons, Ben sees the prevalence of guns as a compelling reason to educate children about them and their use. “My daughters growing up with gun safety and knowledge when they’re of age, even knowing of them now and what to do now if they encounter one, is important,” he said.
Gun safety requires parents to acknowledge their blind spots.
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