This is one of those programs that was long overdue. You can’t address gun violence if you’re not allowed to share basic data about it. You can’t have good safety measures in place without knowing what the trends are or where the issues occur. There have been several good studies that have come out recently that show important trends.
From the article about a study on gun injuries in Utah:
Nearly three-quarters of all unintentional injuries in the state are to males between the ages of 15 and 44, most of whom accidentally shoot themselves while mishandling or cleaning the weapons. With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Utah streamlined its data collection on gun injuries and used that information to create a public service campaign to help prevent accidental gun injuries.
Sounds like basic gun safety training would help in Utah…
This just reinforces my firm belief that a gun safety course should be required before someone can purchase their first firearm.
Absolutely. But a certain subset of people see that as an infringement on their rights. If it prevents injury or death, it’s not an infringement but a reinforcement.
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A well regulated militia you say?
I’m a gunsmith and an avid competitive shooter, and I absolutely think that mandatory training with firearms should be necessary. Right now, it’s mandatory to take a hunter’s safety course before you can obtain a hunting license, which includes firearms safety. In sane states, obtaining a permit to carry a firearm loaded in public (concealed, we won’t get into the idiocy of open carry) requires similar training.
To me, it’s no different than operating a vehicle or any other piece of equipment that has the potential to do great harm to others: You need to have training on how to use it properly and safely, the basics of the law and so on, and ultimately a level of enforced accountability in the event that you fail to follow protocols for safe handling, storage, and usage of said same.
Lots of people expect anti-gun people to abuse the concept through cost and time requirements. Sort of like they did with permits in may issue states. That is where opposition to requirements comes from.
The ATF already does this with suppressors, it’s an arbitrary $200 and an almost 2 year eaitbto buy a simple tube that barely makes your firearm silent. Because morons that write legislation think that Hollywood mouse fart gun silencers are real.
This is why the class should be publicly funded and free for the student.
We used to teach gun safety and handling in school. Bring that back!
Neglect discharge while “cleaning” the firearm is often used to cover up suicide/attempts when it would be inconvenient to talk about. At least that was a thing historically.
Someone has to break a few basic safety rules at the same time to be in the position to shoot themselves. Those rules aren’t complected or hard to follow.
We could bring gun safety classes back to schools if it’s such a concern though.
The amendment made access to granular information — things like who is being injured by firearms and the circumstances that caused those injuries — difficult to come by for health officials, policymakers and politicians. It would often take a year or longer to get such statistics as they worked their way from hospitals and through the public health bureaucracy. That has frustrated efforts to address the tens of thousands of gun deaths that occur in the United States each year.
Starting in 2020, however, nine states and the District of Columbia have received money from the CDC to set up pilot programs to speed the dissemination of this data, with the goal of using it for better public health approaches to the problem.
Wait, so you’re telling me that we’re finally getting the kind of granular data that will help us look at/identify the root causes of gun violence and actually address the underlying disease, rather than just continually trying to band-aid the symptoms? Get outta here.
By address they mean asking people not to do it.
I have significant doubts on how they classify accidental discharge in utah
It doesn’t count if you are soaking.
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