@SrRochardBunson
How times have changed. I was taught firearm safety, along with how to shoot, by my liberal schoolteacher Dad when I was 12. (As a farmboy, he'd most likely taken it up even earlier than that himself.) It might help to understand that this was in Ohio, and that I was born in '56.
The firearm in question was a single-shot bolt action .22, so that you had to reload after every attempt. Definitely brought more attention to one's aim each time. 😉
That set me off on a life-long love of target shooting. Nowadays, it's mostly with revolvers since they're the hardest things for me to shoot well with. I even reload my own cartridges.
I guess that grounding is how I managed to avoid the currently common gun-nuttery I see so often. Handing a child a semi-auto is just trouble waiting to happen, one way or another.
@AndyLowry @SrRochardBunson
My mom and grandpa both had several guns they owned back in the 70s.
Mom took the time to sit me down when I was 6 or 7 years old and made sure to show me the difference between a real gun and a toy gun. She even let me hold the unloaded 38 to tell the difference in weight. And told me I could really hurt someone bad if I tried to play with it.
But from that teaching I never touched a gun as a child.