It’s not such a bad proposal in that proper training creates confidence as well as safety. If I’m buying a set of golf clubs, I want to hit some balls to get the feel of them. If I want to play halfway decent golf, I need to practice. There are two different aspects to the argument, though. It’s one thing to simply buy a gun to stick in a drawer by the bed. If you want to carry in public, then you do have to take a training course. The former scenario poses more of a problem because those buyers are less likely to take it to the range and get used to firing it. Maybe a friend says, “Hey, there have been some break-ins around here. You ought to have a gun in the house,” so the person goes out and gets one without putting much more thought into it. Worse, maybe that person feels anxious about the gun and does the old, “I’d better store the gun and the bullets separately,” routine. When the window breaks at 3 a.m., that gun is worse than useless.

As a nation, we have a schizophrenic attitude about guns. We can have them as a constitutional right and our movies and TV shows are loaded with them, yet many are very uncomfortable with the idea of introducing youth to guns in a safe and educational manner. Some are appalled to see young kids holding squirrel guns with the parents in hunting camo, but that’s just life in large parts of the country. Many wouldn’t even consider teaching inner-city kids how to handle guns safely because of the amount of gun violence there, but maybe we have that backwards. When the first contact with something is illicit, it creates a certain dangerous culture about it. Shouldn’t guns be made “boring” for them, too? Sure, there’s the risk that maybe we just make gang-bangers better shots, but there’s probably a greater benefit in not treating them all as potential savages.