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."

Shoot Him In The Gun!

I'm a little surprised none of the gunbloggers I read seem to have covered this yet, but the most recent Mythbusters covered the popular "disarm the poor bad guy by shooting his gun" myth that's popular both in the movies and with anti-gun advocates who've gained their gun knowledge from movies.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of videos up on Discovery.com, but here's a summary and some of my own observations.

1. Even under lab conditions, you can't knock the gun out of someone's hands 100%. The first test they guys ran was to make a mechanical analogue with the same grip strength as a human hand, and try to shoot the gun out of it. Even with perfect alignment, they couldn't successfully shoot the gun out of the hand when it was pointed forward in firing position.

2. Lead Bullets + Steel Guns = Flying Fragments. The tests referenced above also revealed what happens when a lead bullet strikes a gun: the bullet fragments, providing fast-moving chunks of lead that go in multiple, unpredictable directions. Take a look at the start of this video. In the full episode, they show that a number of the bullet fragments hit the guy holding the gun, and had the gun been next to the head of a hostage, it's entirely possible some of the fragments could have hit the hostage too. Lead fragments and unarmored human tissue aren't a happy mix.

3. You can't predict the human element. To test variations in human reactions, they worked up a way to have the user hold a gun that fired in a different direction, simulating the shock of a bullet hit, and remote fired the gun when the holder wasn't expecting it. Here's a video explaining the design, and the physics that make it work. Jaime dropped the gun two out of three times. Adam never dropped it. Had Adam been an actual target, he could potentially have gotten his gun up and a center of mass shot off even after his gun was hit.

Admittedly, the show wasn't perfect. I would have liked to see the show take the experiments farther, testing different calibers and bouncing a few rounds of a Glock or another wonder-nine, but this did have some great visuals and proof.

What did the episode teach, really? For people who actually make the "well, the cops are trained marksmen, they should just shoot the bad guys in the arms, legs, or gun", this should provide some solid visual and scientific proof for why shooting someone's gun is a bad idea. People will still get hurt, and it's not reliable.