Children and guns revisited

I see many couples, post divorce, when there is disagreement concerning issues regarding their children. As unbelievable as it may be, many of these issues have to do with guns.
Some years ago, a major dispute arose between a divorced couple as a result of the father buying the 8-year-old son a BBgun for his birthday. The mother wanted assurance that the gun would be kept under lock and key and never used without adult supervision.
She was far more flexible, perhaps unwisely so, than a current client who has taken her ex-husband to court over gun issues. The father, who prides himself on his machismo, not only bought his 7-year-old son a BBgun but regularly takes him to a hunting club where deer are pursued and shot.
Imagine the reaction of my client to the debacle involving our vice-president and his BBgun. She felt that if proper precautions were not taken by the quail-shooting, supposedly responsible adults in their orange hunting garb, how could she feel secure about the safety of her child at a hunting club?
The subject of children, guns, and America’s love affair with firearms is a subject that I addressed in an article that I wrote in April 1998 upon my return from London. It was written to express my grief and outrage over the horrendous schoolyard shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The Columbine shooting had not yet occurred although that event and the others that followed were disasters waiting to happen.
The focus of my article was the highly critical attitude expressed by overseas TV and newspapers towards the acceptance and encouragement of gun possession in the United States. The English driver who took me to the airport in London was shocked that Americans “don’t learn from their own tragedies, bowing to a powerful gun lobby.”
I wrote: “An accepted gun culture, when combined with childrens’ exposure to violence and killing on TV, together with inadequate parental supervision creates not only one disaster but one that happens over and over again.” A few months later another such tragedy did occur, this time involving a first grader in Michigan, who shot and killed a 6-year-old classmate.
A follow-up letter to the New York Times stated, “Children are able to shoot their classmates only with adult complicity——Our current gun laws which endanger the majority so that a minority of Americans can legally own guns makes no sense.”
It is important to note that this country, with its ability to travel in outer space, to communicate through a limitless Internet, to develop unimaginable technological wonders, must hang its head in shame in comparison to the good sense of a country like Great Britain where there is no legal gun possession. As an aftermath of the massacre of 18 children in Scotland in 1997, the 23,000 members of the English Rifle Association were required to turn in their guns. Possession of a gun in Great Britain carries an automatic 5 year sentence. Why doesn’t the American government have the good sense to protect the vice-president’s friends as well as the children of “macho” fathers from the very real possibility of a gun disaster?
Sydell S. Sloan, a family therapist, marriage counselor, and divorce mediator has a private practice in Bayside and Manhattan.