Not Entertainment

[kandrathe]

Everyone's got a heart. Not everyone has a gun, or lives around guns. I'll learn gun safety when it becomes even remotely likely that I'll need it. At the moment, it would be less valuable than learning boat safety, electrical safety, food safety, defensive driving, and about a hundred other things.

Yes, I agree. My kids have learned boating safety, and are on their way to becoming advanced swimmers. They've learned about avoiding electricity, at least by the age when they learned how to foil the outlet covers. I've taught them respect for power tools, and chainsaws. Both my sons have their individualized pairs of safety goggles if they even want to hang around when I'm working on projects. I've worked hard to cultivate a healthy respect for things that might kill them, even seemingly mundane stuff like not wearing their bike helmets or seat belts.

But, from my own demented childhood, I realize there will be another time soon, when I can expect them to believe themselves invincible. I recall about 13 was the age when my friends and I dug a tunnel from the barn to the chicken coop, which caved in without killing us. We built ramps to jump our bicycles over drainage ditches like Evel Knievel, we researched and built a Tesla coil, and a laser microphone to listen in on the secret conversations of a particularly pretty young neighbor girl we all had a crush on.