BlockBlaster ad: I Don't Own A Gun. My Son Almost Died Anyway.

Not owning a gun does not protect your child. Locking up the gun does not protect your child. Telling your child to "stop, don't touch, find an adult" does not protect your child. I learned all three of these the same week, from the same pediatric ICU nurse, who has spent eleven years treating the children of the parents who believed all three. I know how that sounds. I would have scrolled past me too six months ago. I am writing this anyway because I am the parent the warning was for, and almost nobody is writing for us. I do not own a firearm. I have never owned a firearm. I will not own a firearm. My husband does not own a firearm. There is no firearm in our house, no firearm in our cars, no firearm at our cabin, no firearm in any container we have ever had keys to. For nine years I believed that fact alone was the answer. That my son was inside a circle the problem could not reach. That gun safety was, in some real way, a conversation for other parents. I want to tell you what I found out. It started with a playdate. Not even a dramatic one. My son had been invited to a birthday party for a boy in his fourth grade class, a boy we did not know well, at a house we had not been to. I asked the questions every good non owner parent asks. Are the parents going to be home. Is anyone else watching. What time is pickup. They were the questions a woman who reads parenting articles knows to ask. I did not ask the one question. I dropped him off. I drove home. I made dinner. I picked him up three hours later. The other mother was lovely. The kids were tired and sticky and happy. We drove home. That night, getting him out of the bath, my son told me, in the casual voice an eight year old uses for things he does not know are important, that one of the boys at the party had shown them his dad's gun. From the closet. In the parents' bedroom. While the parents were downstairs. He said it the way he might have told me they had found a frog. Nobody got hurt. The gun was unloaded. The boys put it back. My son told me on his own because he is the kind of kid who tells me things. The party host parents have no idea this happened, to this day, because I have not figured out how to make that phone call. For six weeks I could not sleep through a night. At 3am the following Tuesday I went down a rabbit hole. The way you do at 3am. I started with the search "child gun safety non gun owner parent." I expected to find what I had always found before. Eddie Eagle. The four rules. Some pamphlets. The same content I had read for nine years and felt, every time, was almost but not quite the right answer. I found a Reddit thread from 2019. A pediatric ICU nurse in a midwestern state, replying to a parent who had asked something close to what I was asking. She had written one of the longest comments I have ever read on Reddit. I read it three times. She wrote this: "I have worked in pediatric intensive care for over a decade. I have personally treated more children with firearm injuries than I can keep an accurate count of. I want you to understand something specific. The children I treat are not, in the majority of cases, the children of gun owning parents who failed to lock something up. The children I treat are most often the children of parents who did not own a firearm, who had no training, who had given their child the standard verbal advice, and whose child encountered an unsecured firearm at someone else's home. The non owner parents send me their children at the same rate the owner parents do. Sometimes higher. Because the owner parents at least taught their child what the object was." That paragraph hit me in the chest. For nine years I had believed I was inside a protective circle. She was telling me, with her professional history as the evidence, that the circle was not there. I had to know more. So I went down the rabbit hole. For four months. What I found absolutely wrecked my understanding of how to protect my child. There is a body of behavioral research, mature since the early 2000s, published in peer reviewed journals, replicated dozens of times, that demonstrates the standard verbal gun safety curriculum does not transfer to behavior. The first major paper on this for children was Miltenberger and Himle, published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 2004. The researchers took a group of children who had been through the Eddie Eagle program. Children who could recite the four rules cleanly. Children whose parents would have sworn they were trained. The researchers put those children in a controlled environment with a real looking handgun and a hidden camera. Most of them picked it up. Several of them pointed it. Some of them pulled the trigger. The researchers tried the verbal curriculum again. Same result. They tried it more intensely. Same result. Then they tried something different. They had the kids physically rehearse the response. Pick up a model. Check the chamber. Run the slide. Set it down. Step back. Hundreds of repetitions. Under adult supervision. With feedback. The numbers moved. Significantly. Weeks later, the response held. The paper explained why in three sentences. Children store spoken rules in the verbal memory system. They store physical reflexes in the procedural motor system. The two systems do not communicate under arousal. In a real encounter, the brain pulls from the procedural drawer, which is built only through physical repetition with a model that approximates the real object. A child who has only ever been told the rule has the verbal drawer full and the procedural drawer empty. In the encounter, the procedural drawer is the one the brain opens. That paper was published twenty two years ago. It has been cited in over a hundred follow up studies. The American Academy of Pediatrics knows about it. Pediatric trauma surgeons know about it. Law enforcement built every modern training protocol around it. Civilian parents have not been told. Non owner parents like me have been told even less. I want to slow down here. Because this is the part that broke me. The advice the country gives to non owner parents is essentially this. You do not own a firearm. So you do not have to think about this much. Just tell your child not to touch one if they see it. Tell them to find an adult. That is the verbal curriculum. The exact curriculum the research has shown for twenty two years does not transfer. It is the curriculum that has been studied, peer reviewed, and rejected, given to non owner parents as if it were a complete answer. Because non owner parents are not the political constituency that anyone is fighting over. Gun owners are. Every dollar of gun safety education in this country is fought over by people trying to influence gun owners. Non owner parents are an afterthought. Our children are an afterthought. The intervention that works was never designed for us. I want to tell you what happened next. I tried to fix the problem the way every good non owner parent would try. I tried to fix it with conversations. I started asking the question. Slowly. Awkwardly. The first time was at a soccer practice. Another mother and I were talking about pickup logistics for an upcoming sleepover, and I said, casually, "and I should ask, do you have any firearms in the house?" She looked at me like I had asked if she beat her children. I tried it again. A different parent. A different angle. I said something about news anxiety, hoping the framing would soften it. The other parent said yes, briefly, and changed the subject so fast I could feel the rejection. I tried it a third time. I tried it in a text message. I tried it in person. I tried it after a glass of wine when I thought it would land more naturally. I tried it as a stated household policy, the way other parents announce nut allergies. "We have a household rule that I ask about firearms before sleepovers, hope that's okay." I asked six parents in six different ways over six months. Two of them lied to me. I know this because in two cases I later found out through other parents that there were firearms in those houses. They lied because the question made them uncomfortable, and the easier answer was no. One of them told the truth and was so offended that my son was uninvited from a future event. Two of them gave answers so vague I could not act on them. "We're responsible owners" is not an answer to whether the firearm is locked. It is a deflection that ends the conversation. One of them gave a clean honest answer and I almost cried at the relief of it. She had a safe, the safe had a code, the code was not the kids' birthday, the ammunition was stored separately, her husband had taken a course. I almost wanted to send her a card. Six conversations. One useful answer. Two lies. One social cost I am still paying. Two non answers. This is the math non owner parents are operating with. The conversations do not work. They do not scale. They make us look paranoid. They get our children uninvited. And even when they do work, they only work for one house at a time, in a child's life that touches dozens of houses every year. The locked storage at home protects your home. The conversations protect, at most, the one house you have managed to ask about, on the day you asked. Neither of them travels with your child. The only thing that travels with your child is what is already in his body. The only thing in my son's body, for nine years, was the verbal curriculum the research has spent twenty two years showing does not transfer. I was sitting on my kitchen floor at 11pm one night, having just hung up with another parent who had clearly lied about a stored firearm, crying, because I felt like I had finally understood the problem and there was no answer for it. Locked storage is for owner parents. Conversations do not work. And the intervention that the research says actually installs the reflex requires a kid scale, functional, safe model of a handgun. Which is exactly what no non owner parent is going to keep in their house. The whole reason I am a non owner parent is that I do not want a handgun in my house. I almost gave up on the entire question. Then I found one. A small group of trainers, gun owners, and parents had built what the research described. A kid scale handgun that operated like a real semi automatic. Working slide. Working magazine. Working safety. Working manual of arms. It fired soft rubber projectiles from spring loaded casings, so the child got the full cycle of fire, eject, reload, and clear, without any real firearm risk. The casings ejected the way real casings eject. The slide locked back the way a real slide locks back. The jams were real jams the child cleared the way real jams are cleared. It was the household equivalent of the SIRT pistol law enforcement has used internally for thirty years. I read about it for a week before I bought one. I cross referenced what it does against the BST literature I had been reading for four months. Every element checked out. Model approximation. Repeated rehearsal. Parent supervised feedback. Age appropriate scaling for the four to twelve window. It is called BlockBlaster. I bought one. We have been using it for four months now. Here is the part that matters for non owner parents specifically. The product is not a firearm. It is not lethal. It cannot become lethal. It is a brick built training tool the size of a kid's hand, that fires a soft rubber projectile a few feet, that comes with instructions for the protocol. There is no scenario in which keeping it in our house creates the risk a real firearm in our house would create. It is closer in risk profile to a Nerf gun than to anything else, except that unlike a Nerf gun, it operates the way the research says the training tool has to operate to install the reflex. My son thinks it is the coolest thing he owns. He has asked to use it on more nights than I have agreed to. I think it is the only thing in our nine year parenting history that has actually moved the dial on the encounter I have been afraid of since he was three. About six weeks in, he started self correcting muzzle direction without being told. Eight weeks in, he was clearing simulated jams faster than I could. Ten weeks in, on a random Tuesday at dinner, I asked him what he would do if he saw a real gun at someone's house. He did not recite anything. He did not pause. He did not have to look up at the ceiling and remember the four rules in order. He said, "I'd put my hands down, back up, and find an adult." That is not a recitation. That is a description of what his body would do. That is the difference. The article with the full breakdown is below. https://block-blaster.com/pages/5reasonswhythisisthebestgunsafetyteachingtool I wrote all of this because I am the parent the warning was for, and I am tired of pretending otherwise. I am tired of being told that the conversation about my child's safety around firearms is a conversation for other parents. I am tired of the curriculum I was given being twenty two years out of date. I am tired of the math of the playdates I cannot interview my way out of. The reflex is the only thing that travels. The reflex has to be built physically. The tool that builds it now exists. The five reasons it is the best teaching tool for this, broken down in plain language, are linked below. 👇 https://block-blaster.com/pages/5reasonswhythisisthebestgunsafetyteachingtool P.S. I do not make anything from any of this. I am writing it down because no one writes for non owner parents, and someone has to. If you are reading this and you are a non owner parent, you are the audience this twenty two year old research has been most aggressively kept from. Not because anyone has actively suppressed it from us. Because we are not the constituency anyone is fighting over. The intervention that works was built by people who own firearms and care about their own children. Their children are now better protected than ours. The civilian version has finally been built. The link is below. https://block-blaster.com/pages/5reasonswhythisisthebestgunsafetyteachingtool P.P.S. If you have read all of this and are still on the fence, the question to ask yourself is the question I asked myself at 11pm on my kitchen floor. When my child is in a room with another child who has just pulled a real handgun out of a closet, what does my child's body already know how to do. If the answer is "say the right words to himself," he is operating on the system that has been studied for twenty two years and shown not to fire. If you want the answer to be "step back, hands down, walk away, find an adult," that answer has to be built into him before he is in the room. The product page is linked below. 👇 https://block-blaster.com/products/blockblaster-diy-ops-handle-set