Hi MurBob,
Welcome to TFL! You'll find lots of good advice here (and some highly suspect stuff too, which is the nature of the internet). Learning to sort through the good advice and throw the rest away -- that's the fun part.
<flourishes credentials> My husband and I have five children, all boys. Our oldest son was only five years old when our youngest son was born. No twins, just the baby-a-year plan for five years in a row. So our gun storage problem was a little more intense than most need to deal with.
Our children are all now healthy and happy young adults, ranging in age from 20 to 26. To the best of my knowledge (now that their "don't tell mom!" stories are starting to come to light), they never touched one of my firearms without permission. One of the only two close calls that I'm aware of happened at a neighbor's house, and was handled appropriately because we had already role-played "what would you do if your friend wanted to show you his dad's gun?" before that happened.
The other close call was my own fault; a miscommunication with a friend who stopped over at our place after a trip to the range. He invited me and the kids out to lunch, and came inside to use the bathroom while I was grabbing my purse and locking up the house. I shoo'd our youngest three boys -- then ages 5, 6, 7 -- out to the car ahead of me. Maybe a minute and a half later, they came running back inside: "Mom, there's a gun in the back seat! We didn't touch it. Is it real? We didn't think you would have sent us out there if it was real, but we remembered you said if it wasn't real, we got to treat it like it's real so we didn't touch it. Okay, mom?" (The gun was real. It was in our buddy's open range bag, which was sitting on the floor behind the driver's seat.)
Both of those incidents, to me, really highlighted the importance of
educating kids about gun safety -- and doing it
before there's an issue. There are a number of articles on my webpage about this, all under the header of "Kids and Guns" from the
main page.
Educating the kids is NOT enough. It's a critical layer of safety, but it's only
one layer. The other essential layer is keeping guns under the conscious control of a responsible adult, or locked up where children (and criminals, and clueless people) cannot access them.
We do this because human beings are not perfect. Neither adults nor children are perfect. We need two layers to take care of the two types of non-perfect behavior we see from human beings:
- Educating the children insures against times when adults are not perfect, and leave guns where irresponsible and untrained people can access them.
.
- Locking up the guns insures against times when children are not perfect, and do things they've been taught not to do, or do things in a childlishly awkward or clumsy way, or let their friends push them into things they know they shouldn't try.
Both safety layers are essential.
You will sometimes come across older people who will tell you that they raised a bunch of kids and "never had one touch a gun when they shouldn't!", so locking up the guns isn't necessary. That's a good story,
but it's not worth betting your child's life on it. It's also a logical fallacy: the presumption that a single dangerous act, or even a series of dangerous acts, will always result in immediate catastrophe. (If you want to follow that thought down the rabbit hole, I'd be happy to discuss it. Or you can simply Google the phrase "normalization of deviance" and think about how it might apply to non-rigorous safety behavior around firearms.)
As for specific ways to keep your child safe at home, my own personal solution was to simply keep wearing the gun when I got home from wherever I'd been. You'll find my long-winded explanation for the reasons in
this article on my site. The short version is that although my husband and I live in a beautiful, low-crime, rural area, I knew that it would take a
long time for anyone to respond to the call if I did need help -- because living in a rural area generally means long response times. So I went out and got my CPR certification, learned how to stop bleeding, and decided to carry a gun as I went through my daily life.
None of these were based on the odds, but on the stakes.
From that article:
But I got thinking about it. If a rapist or murderer came slamming through my front door, would I have time to fetch a <gun>from the next room in time to save my children’s lives and protect myself? Possibly not...
Worse still, if someone did come slamming in the front door, or slithering in through a window, would I have to make the awful choice to leave my children alone in the room with him in order to grab the gun? What if he grabbed one of my kids and just … left? I shuddered at the thought!
I considered leaving the shotgun accessible to me in the living room instead of in a back room. But what if we were all in the back of the house and an intruder entered? The dilemma remained the same.
But that was my own reasoning, and need not be yours.
In any case, you'll need a safe. Small, quick-access safes cost less than $200, many of them less than $100. (See
here for one example of an excellent product designed to hold a single firearm.) I would steer clear of "biometric" designs, which are not yet as reliable as their mechanical counterparts.
That's about it. Good luck and stay safe!
pax
