[Note: LIFE.com is aware that find images of weapons and the children in a classroom may be distressing to some readers - even if those images were made for decades and represent an adult school in a rural community in the correct and safe use of firearms instructing.] [Our intention is not to incite, but to add context and nuances to the national dialogue about guns, violence and security of the gun in the United States.]
Weapons. Sometimes it seems, especially that we cannot speak of any thing in American life without somehow, sometime, now refers to enduring obsession nation by arms. After the unspeakable horror of Sandy Hook (and the massacre of temple Sikh of Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, Columbine, killing of 2011 of Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson, Chicago frightening spike in gun violence in 2012 and continues), the national conversation for the rights of gun and arms control has taken on an urgency verging at times despair.
What the hell, everyone seems to ask, we can do about death without end?
Numbers related to armed violence in the land of the free are, of course, deeply chilling. More than 8,500 Americans were killed by weapons (or rather, by the killers) wielding weapons in 2011, according to the latest data from the FBI. Of those, 565 were under the age of 18 years; 119 were children of 12 years or less. Wherever one lower in the debate of the gun, most healthy people can be agreed that these statistics are shameful national and... well, crazy.
But there are literally tens of millions of Americans who own and shoot weapons completely within the letter and the spirit of the law. For example, hunting is a pastime and a rite of passage in countless communities around the United States and the majority of hunters - men and women and children - is not taking deer, bears and ducks and doves with slingshots or bows and arrows. They use rifles and shotguns - as they have done for generations.
For six decades, in its March 26, 1956, Edition, LIFE magazine published a remarkable series of photos that accompanied an article entitled "A grain of drawing on safety". Here, with the hope to provide at least a little more context and a small degree of perspective in the arms of the nation debate, life takes those images and that article. After all, the focal point of the current discussion around weapons is how to make safer communities. Assuming that shotguns, at least, it is likely that he will be with us for a while and that families and friends will continue to hunt together for the foreseeable future, lessons on how to shoot what you are hunting, rather than blasting itself or the companions, always will have a necessary place in our gun-happy culture.
Like life in "Drawing a bead on safety," all those years (citing a statistic that is atrocious even today):
In 1954, more than 550 American children under 15 died in accidents related to careless handling of firearms, five of them in lake County, Indiana. [In 2010, 606 people were killed by "accidental discharge of firearms," according to the CDC. - ed.] This situation impacted to Indiana conservation officer Rod Rankin, who decided to offer a course in gun safety to all children interested in the County. Last year 2,500 children of 6 years, with the approval of their parents, have adopted it in it.
Rankin stressed two things: never designated as weapon to anyone, not even in the game and always check immediately if the gun is loaded... Rankin is glad to answer routine questions such as "how fast and far a bullet go?" but tries to the talk to "have you shot someone?" and "do if you shoot a man in the head how long it takes to die?"
Some people think that Rankin is from children in arms too young. But the National Rifle Association says that four States now permit gun safety in elementary courses and says, "the earlier a child learns to respect a gun and what not to do with it natural curiosity's best chance to not get it into trouble".
Love or hate the NRA, it is difficult to argue with a logic that emphasizes education and firearms safety.
Now, those millions of firearms without a license out there...
-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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