Gun Ed -- Treating Gun Education Like Sex Education

The following was inspired by a comment to Bayou Renaissance Man's recent post about the failure of sex education in Britain.

March 1, 2010
Principal Carlos Vasquez of Compton's troubled Martin Luther King High School announced a radical new program today aimed at reducing the number of deaths due to violent gun crimes. Named "Safe Guns", the program acknowledges that almost one out of every two youths in the high school will at some point be affiliated with one of the gangs which claims Compton for their territory, and that most of the youths attending the school already have access to firearms provided by "Sumdood." The mandatory marksmanship class will replace health class two days a week.

The program has four stated goals:

1. Reduce accidental shootings of innocent bystanders by teaching students proper shooting techniques and marksmanship.
2. Eliminate self-inflicted gunshot wounds by providing each student with a holster appropriate to their gun of choice, and training/demonstrations on how to properly holster and carry their weapons.
3. Lower lethality of gang violence by encouraging students to explore alternatives to traditional center-of-mass shots and target arms, legs, hands and feet instead. This will also be accomplished by providing students with free hardball ammunition, which has been proven to cause less wounding and death than hollow-point or cop-killer bullets, and is less likely to wound a student by explosively failing in their firearm of choice.
4. Protect students from injuries caused by cheap black-market firearms by providing them with safe, reputable alternatives.

About Compton
Since the 1950s, Compton's murder and violent crime rate has risen steadily, although it had dropped several percentage points since 2002. However, citing an average murder and gun violence rate still several times higher than the national average, school officials feel that this radical plan was the best solution. "They're going to shoot each other anyway" said one school official off the record. "The best we can do is teach them to be more responsible about when, where, and what they shoot."