Finally, a Gun Initiative We Can Agree On

Let’s talk about guns. (Again? Still!?!)

But today let’s not talk about controlling them or banning them.

And let’s not talk about protecting them or defending them.

Let’s just accept that some 270 million of them exist in homes across the nation.

Guns: Not good or bad. Not right or wrong. Just there.

Susan Farrand would love to switch the discussion.

Twenty years ago, Farrand was part of a project of the University of New Mexico Department of Emergency Medicine on firearm safety, which was designed to try to put a dent in the statistics regarding accidental gun deaths and injuries among children.

Back then, over a five-year period, 25 New Mexico children were killed in firearm accidents and another 200 sought treatment at emergency rooms for injuries.

Farrand’s part in the push was a safety curriculum, a nice 100-page booklet with stories, lesson plans, worksheets and discussion questions to bring kids up close and personal with how dangerous a gun can be in the wrong hands.

She tested the curriculum at a couple of Albuquerque elementary schools and a middle school and found that it drew students out and engaged them and in doing so turned them into firearm safety ambassadors when they went home.

She incorporated the students’ stories and drawings into the final curriculum, and she and her husband, Alex, got in the car and delivered a copy to every school district in the state.

The news has been dominated recently by high-profile mass shootings that aren’t at all accidental. But the last two — in Newtown, Conn., and in the South Valley here — involved young people who used guns that were available to them in their family homes.

Farrand, a thoughtful woman whose careers have been in teaching and writing, has read the news and wondered, “Why isn’t anyone talking about education?”

The troubling statistics that prompted the firearm injury prevention curriculum dated from 1984 through 1988 and analyzed unintentional firearm deaths and injuries among children in New Mexico under age 15.

Most of the fatal cases — 88 percent — occurred inside the home. Most — 56 percent — involved handguns. Loaded firearms were readily accessible in 93 percent of the fatal shootings.

The numbers here look better now. In the late 1980s, 40 children on average were injured by firearms each year. These days, it’s about 20, but BB and pellet guns account for another 60 or so injuries a year.

(Motor vehicles, then and now, are the leading killer and maimer of New Mexico children.)

Farrand’s curriculum hewed to the basics of the NRA’s gun safety points: Stop. Don’t touch. Leave the area. Tell a trusted adult.

Easy to say, tough to practice. A lot of kids are fascinated with guns. They play with toy ones, make them out of sticks and with their thumb and finger, see them in video games and draw them, as Farrand learned when she saw all the detailed, well-practiced artwork the kids handed in.

What kids don’t tend to think about is how to tell if a gun is loaded, how easily it can be fired or how easily it can discharge if it’s dropped. They don’t think about how bullets ricochet. Or what a bullet injury feels like or all the people who are affected when someone dies.

Farrand’s curriculum didn’t preach any of that, but it made it all come alive in readings, discussions, drawing and creative writing.

I asked Farrand what surprising thing she learned from teaching the course.

In nearly half the pictures, she said, “the gun was in the dresser drawer.”

Kids write and draw what they know, which means the comforting idea that guns are locked up properly in most homes is a fantasy.

The curriculum was paid for with a federal grant and developed through UNM, which is to say that we own it. It’s about 100 pages and could be easily and inexpensively copied.

As I sat at the Farrands’ dining room table talking about the curriculum, I started to jot down a list of people who might be interested in reviving it: any of our school districts, legislators, N.M. Department of Health, Mayor Richard Berry, the governor and the pastors at Calvary, the megachurch where Nehemiah Griego attended services before he told a church security guard that his family was dead.

Any takers?

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal