When parents fail to provide information about firearms, children may accept the violent perspective offered by virtual fantasy games and the gritty reality of the street. Children simply may not build a healthy attitude toward guns. Responsible parents exert a high degree of control over the food that their children eat, over the friends that their children play with and on the media their children consume. Some parents try to keep their children from playing with toy guns and monitor their entertainment with caution bordering on panic. Others try to overcome children's curiosity by taking them to a firing range, hoping their visceral understanding of the weapon's power will take the luster off its image.
Experts say both approaches can produce the same positive result.
A toxic environment Guns and children often come into contact in the real world. Six percent of all youths told surveyors for the Centers for Disease Control they carried a gun. Now in 1995 said they were afraid of being shot or stabbed at home. Video games, movies, television shows and the nightly news may or may not cause kids to abuse firearms, said Anthony Biglan of the Oregon Research Institute. But they are the soil in which children's ideas about guns and violence grow.