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Popular Parenting Expert Randy Rolfe
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Press Release
Parenting Expert and Author Randy Rolfe Objects to Gun Industry's Direct Marketing to Youngsters in Light of Recent School Shooting Events
Parent - Child Communications Expert, Author, and Popular Radio Host of "Family First" on Voice America Net Talk Radio, Randy Rolfe Seeks to Alert Parents to Increased Efforts by the Gun Industry to Market Directly to Their Kids
West Chester PA - The Institute for Creative Solutions today announced that Randy Rolfe, author, parenting expert, and radio host, seeks to alert parents to the aggressive direct marketing to their kids by the gun industry and objects to encouraging kids to handle guns in light of the recent school shooting events.
In the last five years, gun manufacturers have begun an aggressive campaign to put guns in the hands of kids, says parenting expert Randy Rolfe, author of The Seven Secrets of Successful Parents. Responding to the New York Times article on this effort, Rolfe points out that even with all the coverage of the tragic events in Newtown CN, few media stories revealed that, according to the NYT article by Mike McIntire, entitled "Selling a New Generation on Guns:"
"The shooting sports foundation, the tax-exempt trade association for the gun industry, is a driving force behind many of the newest youth initiatives. Its national headquarters is in Newtown, just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza, 20, used his mother's Bushmaster AR-15 to kill 20 children and 6 adults last month."
Says Randy Rolfe, "We cannot know if there is any relationship but it is rather a coincidence at least."
Rolfe points out that the industry has developed a number of studies about how to get more kids into the funnel to want to use guns and to eventually buy them as soon as they can, once they are 18. Meanwhile, many states allow kids to use guns as long as they are supervised by an adult. The gun industry initiatives include encouraging children to take up guns for recreational hunting and target shooting. Grants to various youth organizations are taking the form of supplying guns, ammunition, and money and emphasizing the "responsibility" which handling a gun teaches.
Another initiative, Rolfe notes, is a video game using semi-automatic weapons, which game also happens to include links to gun manufacturers. The gun industry asserts that it is important to maintain the American tradition of hunting, marksmanship, and self-defense with guns.
Apparently the marketing effort resulted from the gun industry's awareness that sales were falling off in the last few decades. The effort to appeal to youth includes starting very young kids with the idea of shooting, with darts and bow and arrow. The literature suggests not using human forms as targets since this may seem violent, but rather words, like "family" or "fun."
Rolfe says she found the NYT article very disturbing. In some cultures, in the country, where hunting is really still part of the culture, she doesn't have a problem with parents teaching their children to hunt with a rifle after reaching a certain age of maturity, say 14 or later. But the need for semi-automatics for young people seems bogus, she asserts, and there is no excuse for starting four or five year olds or even eight year olds shooting with life-threatening guns. The gun literature actually speaks of using guns as a way to teach maturity and responsibility. There are much safer ways to learn these life skills, says Rolfe.
Another tenet of the industry, Rolfe notes, is that parents are the best judges of when their children are ready to handle guns. We don't leave it up to parents, she says, to decide about when their kids can handle alcohol, cigarettes, or military duties, or when they can operate a motor vehicle, or even when they need to start school or learn to read. Why would we leave it up to parents then, asks Rolfe, to decide when their child can handle a life-threatening weapon which can kill more people in a minute than even an out-of-control car ever could?
Rolfe wants parents to know that, according to the NYT article:
"The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle. At the end of an accompanying article that extolled target shooting with a Bushmaster AR-15 - an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine directed readers to a coupon for buying one - the author encouraged youngsters to share the article with a parent."
As Rolfe was sharing her thoughts late last Thursday afternoon, there was the news of the school shooting in Atlanta in which a 14 year old girl was shot in the head and is now hospitalized while a teacher was also injured. The suspect in custody is believed to be a fellow student.
Children are children, says Rolfe, because they have much to learn to take their place in human society. Full maturity is believed to be reached around age 25. A full understanding of the meaning of life and death can hardly be expected of a child of 8, 10, or 12. Putting weapons that are equivalent to those issued to trained soldiers for war operations in combat zones into the hands of our children is to be discouraged and avoided, says Rolfe.
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