OPINION: MANDATORY FIREARM SAFETY CLASSES AT NRHS B Y D Y L A N S AU N D E R S
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hen I was in sixth grade, a young woman drove to North Royalton High School with her dad’s pistol on her rear bumper. Without knowing or meaning to, the high schooler brought a firearm onto campus and put lives in danger. I remember huddling in the NRMS locker rooms, wondering if my brother would live through his honors biology class. Thankfully, the students who spotted the firearm knew what to do, and nobody got hurt that day. However, those events left me with an unsettling mental scenario: what if it wasn’t those students who found the gun? My family doesn’t own firearms, and we have no interest in them. This hasn’t prevented me from coming across unsecured guns over the course of my life. In many places, especially schools, guns are a taboo subject. No one wants to associate themselves with firearms because they are attached to violence, danger, and death in general. Herein lies the problem: fearing firearms does not prepare one to handle a firearm situation. An uneducated person around a loose firearm is a danger to themselves and others. For this reason, firearm safety should be a graduation requirement for high school. To be clear, this isn’t a statement piece on the Second Amendment, gun violence, school shootings, or any related issue. This is an argument for
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a public health and safety program. Guns are a major part of American culture. Experts from the Small Arms Survey estimate that Americans civilians own 393 million firearms, used for recreation, hunting, sporting, and defense. It is highly unlikely that legislators will completely ban firearms in the near future, so finding an unsecured firearm remains a very real possibility for civilians. The Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services report on unintentional firearm injuries found that males in the 15-24 year-old range were most
Data provided by the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services illustrating fatal firearm accidents by age group from 2012-2014.
