“What’s that smell dad?”

“Freedom son, that’s the smell of freedom,” I reply to my five-year-old son as I eject the spent mag to my Sig Saur P320.

I say this as a joke, but I know it harbors a good deal of truth. I let him and his sister approach the table now that the weapon is cleared and let them ask any questions they may have.

The faucet is opened and a turret of questions comes forth in an exhaustless stream. Just what I was hoping for.

The decision was made before they were born to introduce them to firearms at a young age. The attitude of ‘what they don’t know won’t kill them’ holds no place in the world of guns. Sheltering them from their presence was not a possibility for us, given that the family business deals with firearm cleaning products. Nor did we want to on principle alone.

They needed to be taught the significance of guns. You don’t just hand a child the keys to the family car and hope for the best. You instruct, you teach and you introduce. In other words, you parent.

To be honest, it’s scary being a parent these days. Though I don’t trust the twenty-four-hour news cycle to give us a proper representation of what our world is like, there are events attached to firearms that weren’t there in my parents’ era.

I’m also a firm believer that you don’t displace blame onto an inanimate object and ignore the underlying problem. Pencils don’t misspell words, just as guns don’t kill people; humans do.

So we implemented a think globally, act locally plan. We can’t control what other parents teach their kids, but we certainly could control how and what we teach ours.

“How does it work dad?” I hear my daughter ask as she approaches the table.

“First of all, every one of these guns you see on the table is extremely dangerous. They have the potential to kill you or someone else. Remember when we went hunting and daddy shot a grouse? Remember how it fell from the sky? It was permanent. He died. There was no coming back, right?” I say to both of them, making full eye contact so they both know the seriousness of the situation.

They both learned about death at a young age. Coddling has never been part of our parenting plan. Don’t horrify them into a coma, but let them see the lifecycle from an early age and their part in it. Let them know that what we are experiencing isn’t permanent. Let them see the finality of our actions.

And this last sentence holds extremely true for firearms. There is no reset button when using them. The action you decide to take can stay with you and others for a lifetime. This can both be a positive thing, like in saving a loved one, or a negative thing, such as taking them away.

But that is a lesson for another day. They are still too young to need to know of the atrocities that have been committed with these tools. For now, the importance of safety is the primary concern.

“You shot him and then we ate him,” comes my son’s response.

“Exactly. This shotgun here,” I say as I point to my over/under laying on the table, “killed that grouse.”

I want to make that connection that a tool in the hands of a human can have serious consequences on the life of another creature.

I go on to let them know that they are never to touch a firearm unless I or their mother is with them and assisting. I let them know that the weapon itself is not bad, but what a human can do with one can be.

I decide I’m not quite as old-school as my father was and to introduce them to a beginner version. The mule kick of my father’s 12 gauge as a kid still has me flinching when I pick up that old Mossberg pump. Not the way I’m going to go about it with mine.

I crack the barrel of the pellet gun I picked up for this purpose as well as ‘enticing’ the tree rats back home to stay out of the attic.

My son mounts the pellet gun to his shoulder with my help. His alligator arms are too short to make it all the way to the trigger so I help him out. He aims carefully and implores me to pull the trigger.

A soda can ten yards away spasms into the air. Action, reaction. He’s hooked. He also understands that by pulling the trigger, he made that can move. His action had an effect.

In a simple lesson on how to shoot a pellet gun, he learned personal sovereignty. A lesson that seems to be fading away in a polarized world that encourages them to find blame in the “enemy” and acquit them of their own personal responsibilities. But this is a blog about introducing children to firearms, not my diatribe on why the world is falling apart.

I fade out of my internal contemplations. School is back in session as I notice my daughter looking on with genuine interest.

“You’re up peanut,” I say and she inches forward.

// Fred Bohm