re: #343 Political Atheist

To me the time invested and risk is so minor that the odds of any individual school/library worker needing it is unimportant. The benefit potential is literally life saving. By my admittedly rough analogy it’s a bit like vaccination for a really rare disease.

There is a certainty that guns do get misplaced, not as part of a crime and a non gun owner being in the right spot to safely take it from harms way where a kid could find it or a passerby steals it. Of course those accidental misplacement happen at homes too. The safety skills are then with the trainees 24/7. That’s more people that can speak up if they see any unsafe mishandling correctly in any ordinary circumstance like where one person might be showing a gun to another at a home.

From my own experience, I know this isn’t quite true. Any training you take that isn’t implemented right after will be lost in the ‘intellectual memories’ part of your mind, rather than the ‘learned skills’ part. I took a two-day course in using MS Project, including alls sorts of in depth stuff on resourcing etc. Did really well. Two months later, all I could remember was how to do a Gantt chart.

Gun safety is like that. Folks who grow up around guns and who are trained from an early age in how to shoot (and how not to shoot when you don’t want to) generally but not invariably, internalize the lessons, and know at a deep level things like ‘every gun is loaded until you personally have cleared the action’, and ‘never point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot’. For the rest of us, it’s just intellectual memories, and yes, I fall into that category.