Why Are We Gun-Shy About Asking Parents This Tough Question?

I think best when I jog, and for many, many miles, I’ve been trying to work out a question for the parents of my two little boys’ friends. Or more exactly, trying to repeat it often enough to myself that it would be easy to say to them: “Thanks for having my son over. There’s just one thing I need to ask. Do you have a gun in your house?”

It’s an awful question. Chances are you’ve never thought of asking it, or of being asked it, and you’d just as soon not start now.

It implies a lack of trust, a suspicion that the child is not in responsible hands.

Linda Marten felt the same way. She teaches parenting and school-readiness to the mothers and fathers of 4-year-olds in a Los Angeles Unified School District program. One session is devoted to safety--the dangers of cleaning supplies, hot stoves ... and guns. She urges parents to ask about the presence of guns in the homes their children visit.

As the mother of two children, Marten decided that much as she didn’t want to, she’d have to practice what she preached and ask the question, even of neighbors she’d known for years. “It took some courage for me to do that,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was going to get, what reaction.”

She learned that one neighbor would never keep a gun because his brother had been shot. A mother told her she didn’t know whether her husband had a gun.

She worked to ask the question lightly, as if it was routine. With practice, it became so, and Marten realized, “You know, I’m getting used to this.”

When her 13-year-old son was invited for a sleepover party, she learned that there was a gun, though just an old BB gun, in the house. The parents agreed to remove it.

The chance that a child will be shot is very small. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that in 1998, the last year statistics were available, 179 children 9 and younger died of gunshots nationwide; the total was 3,613 for children ages 10 to 19.

In Los Angeles County, 981 people died of gunshots in 1999, 184 of them--more than three a week--19 or younger, according to the advocacy group Women Against Gun Violence, which goes through death certificates to compile statistics. Twenty-two were 14 or younger.

By comparison, 63 children 14 and younger died of cancer in 1998, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Statistics.

Perhaps the idea of questioning other families about guns could be dismissed as one more of the fears today’s parents have the luxury of harboring. Still, there are 200 million guns in private hands in the United States. They’re in 40% of households.

“Parents should assume that the chance is very, very high that at some point, their children are going somewhere where guns are present,” said Clayton Cramer, a computer programmer, writer and gun owner whose books include “For the Defense of Themselves and the State,” a history of court interpretations of the right to bear arms.

His approach to keeping his family safe was education. When his two children were 8 or 9, he took them to a shooting range and showed them what a bullet could do to a bottle of colored water. It was a “sobering” lesson, said Cramer, who lives in Sonoma County.

He feels confident his children, 13 and 17, know what to do, but even children who have been taught to go to an adult if they come upon a weapon don’t always do so.

Kids are famously, frighteningly, unable to understand their own mortality. That’s true for little ones who might happen upon a gun, and it’s true for teenagers.

Many people who have considered this issue agree that if there’s a gun at hand, it’s folly to presume a child doesn’t know where it is, or if sufficiently determined, couldn’t figure it out.

In an Atlanta-area study reported in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, groups of two or three boys, ages 8 to 12, were placed in a room where a disabled handgun was concealed in a drawer. Of the 29 groups of boys, 21 found the gun, 16 handled it. In 10 groups, at least one boy pulled the trigger. Only one group left the room to tell an adult about the gun.

The researchers said the parents’ expectations of their sons’ interest in guns did not predict their behavior. And, they said, most of the boys who handled the gun had been given gun safety instruction at home or in school.

One recent day, in a tiny room at Century Park School in Inglewood, parents gather for Marten’s class, with guest speakers from Women Against Gun Violence.

Despite the squirming toddlers, the parents listen raptly to Sheri Barnett. She tells them, the way she has told and retold people over the last three years, that she wished “someone had come to talk to me about the state of gun violence” when her baby was still squirming around on the floor.

Three years ago, her baby, her sweet, 25-year-old Tony, was murdered, shot many times. His murder has not been solved.

She shows pictures of him young and smiling and handsome. She holds up his death certificate, noting how like a birth certificate it looks. She even displays the coroner’s report.

“My belief is that whatever the circumstances were of Tony’s murder, the reason my son died is because of the amount of guns there are in this country, because of the easy access to guns,” she says.

Barnett became convinced that some good could come of her pain if she spoke out to change the culture. So she and another speaker, Ericka Lozano, manager of programs and outreach for Women Against Gun Violence, are in Inglewood this day to warn parents.

And to give them hope.

They recall the campaigns against smoking and drunk driving, and how people felt--wrongly, as it turned out--that things would never change.

Barnett and Lozano want these parents to get rid of any guns in their homes, or short of that, to lock them up in specially made boxes and store ammunition separately. And they want them to ask adults who play host to their children--friends, baby-sitters, neighbors--if they have guns at home.

Of eight parents in the room that day, six raise their hands when asked if they know someone who has been shot. At least one woman, holding a newborn, says she will ask the question.

“My son plays with the family next door all the time, and it never even occurred to me to ask,” she says.

Marten gently encourages them.

“Don’t underestimate the power of your asking a parent, ‘Do you have a gun in the house?”’ she says. “I think that’s maybe where the real change happens.”

And, she said, some families are relieved, because then they can ask in return.

So far, I’ve had it easy. I’ve practiced asking a few mothers, whose children are my sons’ friends. Those women are also my friends, and none has had a gun. One day, though, one of my boys will be asked to a new home. And I will have to ask that awful question.

I’m not looking forward to it. You might say it’s not even worth it. That life is full of risks.

But is not asking a reasonable risk?

If I don’t ask, and tragedy follows, how could I live with myself?