Guns in schools. What do you think?

Is there a place in our schools for a gun-awareness programme?

The army visited a school - Whakarongo school - near Palmerston North, to teach children about leadership and weaponry.

And now our education ministry is reviewing what is appropriate when it comes to guns in schools, and it will issue new guidelines in a couple of months.

I suspect those guidelines will ban all forms of weaponry in our schools.

But is that the right decision? If a gun awareness programme was offered at my son's school, what would I say? I would probably say yes, I think.

And that’s because when I was a child I was often exposed to guns, and because of that, I'm not and never have been fascinated by them. I grew up near Burnham military camp and every day soldiers ran past our farm as part of their training. More often then not, they were wearing full kit and carrying a weapon of some sort. Sometimes on the defence force land you'd hear gunfire and explosions, odd as it may sound, it was a fairly normal part of life back then.

I was used to guns on the farm too. They were an essential part of farm life, and as I grew up I was taught to respect them. I knew to treat every gun as a loaded weapon. I handled them from time to time. I fired a shotgun under supervision, and a 22, and I mucked about with a bit of clay-bird shooting too. I remember the first time I fired a shotgun, the kick-back in my shoulder made me realise the sheer force of what I was handling. It was quite terrifying, if I'm honest.

And so the exposure I had to guns meant they have never held any intrigue for me. I have always given them a wide berth.

And for that reason, I think some form of gun education in schools isn’t such a bad thing. You’re not glorifying guns. You’re not placing a gun in a child’s hands and letting them shoot at the cardboard cut-out of a man. But any gun education programme does need clear guidelines. The children at Whakarongo school were handling assault rifles, and that's what is quite confronting about this. If there was to be a gun education programme in our schools, the defence force and the education ministry would need to sit down and work out what is and isn't appropriate.

The Greens have said it was an act of propaganda. Was it? No. Of course not. The defence force isn't trying to glorify guns or recruit future soldiers.

In fact, if anyone is going to teach your child about firearms and how to respect them, then our soldiers are the best people to do that. There is no organisation in the country that is better trained in their use.

But the situation at Whakarongo school has raised a valid point. The legitimate ownership and use of firearms in this country means at some stage we are all likely to be exposed to them. So is it better to educate and inform our children about them? I would argue that education is better than ignorance.