Jared Duffey

Your child cannot answer the question. Not the way you think he can. Not the way the video promised he would. Not the way the school assembly said the test would go. I found this out at my own dinner table last Tuesday, asking a question I thought I already knew the answer to, watching my eight year old freeze for six full seconds before he started reciting the four rules as a substitute for the answer he did not have. I know how that sounds. I would have scrolled past me too four months ago. I am writing this anyway because I am the parent who ran the test and got the wrong answer, and almost nobody is talking about what the wrong answer means. Let me tell you what happened. It was a normal Tuesday. We were eating spaghetti. My son was eight. He had been through the Eddie Eagle program in second grade. He had sat through a gun safety assembly at school the year before. We had read Julie Golob's book together twice. He had recited the four rules to me on demand more times than I can count. By every parenting metric I had been given, my child was trained. I asked him, in the casual voice you use when you are asking a question to which you already know the answer, what he would do if he saw a real gun at a friend's house. He looked up from his plate. He froze. I want to slow down and describe this exactly. Because the thing I saw on his face is the thing the entire research literature is about, and almost no parent in America has ever had it named for them. He did not have an answer ready. He had something else ready. He had a recitation ready. And I watched him, in real time, search for the file labeled "four rules" instead of searching for the file labeled "what I would do." His mouth opened. He closed it. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at me. He said "wait, hold on." And then he started, in the careful voice an eight year old uses when he is performing for a parent, to recite the four rules of firearm safety in order. The four rules he had recited twenty seven times in our living room. The four rules the school had drilled into him. The four rules he had passed the verbal quiz on at every checkpoint anyone had ever set for him. He could not answer my question without first running the recitation as a workaround. I sat there with a fork in my hand and watched my son show me, with his face, that the system every authority in his life had told us was the system, was not the system. The four rules are not the answer. The four rules are the answer to a different question. The question of whether he can recite them. The question I had asked him was a different question. And for that question, the procedural drawer his brain reached for was empty. I did not say anything that night. I told him he did great. We finished dinner. I cleaned the kitchen. I waited until he was asleep. Then I went upstairs and sat on the edge of our bed and stared at the wall, because I had just watched the foundation of every safety conversation I had ever had with my son not hold weight when it had to. At 1am I went down a rabbit hole. The way you do at 1am. I started with the search "child cannot answer gun safety question." I expected to find nothing. I found, on the third page of results, a small academic paper. The author was a woman in her sixties who had spent thirty four years as an applied behavior analyst working in elementary schools. The paper was titled something I will not retype here because the title was buried in jargon. But the paragraph I am about to quote was not buried. She wrote this: "When a child responds to a safety question with a verbal recitation that does not directly answer the question, what you are observing is the procedural memory deficit in real time. The child has been trained on the recitation. The child has not been trained on the response. He is, in the moment of being asked, attempting to derive the response from the recitation, because the recitation is the only file he has access to. In a real encounter, where there is no time to perform the derivation, the child will not derive. He will recite, or he will reach. The recitation has never, in the literature, been shown to override the reach." That paragraph wrecked me. Because that was what I had just seen at my own kitchen table. I had not seen it for what it was. I had seen a kid who was thinking carefully about a question. I had thought "he is being so good, he is really trying." What I had actually seen was the empty drawer my son's brain was looking for the answer in. I had to know more. So I went down the rabbit hole. For three months. What I found absolutely wrecked my understanding of how kids actually learn the things we tell them they have learned. There is a body of behavioral research, mature since the early 2000s, published in peer reviewed journals, replicated dozens of times, that demonstrates the standard verbal gun safety curriculum does not transfer to behavior. The first major paper on this for children was Miltenberger and Himle, published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 2004. The researchers took a group of children who had been through the Eddie Eagle program. Children who could recite the four rules cleanly. Children whose parents would have sworn, on a stack of safety pamphlets, that their kids were trained. The same children my child was, last Tuesday, at my dinner table. The researchers put those children in a controlled environment with a real looking handgun and a hidden camera. Most of them picked it up. Several of them pointed it. Some of them pulled the trigger. The researchers tried the verbal curriculum again. Same result. They tried it more intensely. Same result. Then they tried something different. They had the kids physically rehearse the response. Pick up a model. Check the chamber. Run the slide. Set it down. Step back. Hundreds of repetitions. Under adult supervision. With feedback. The numbers moved. Significantly. Weeks later, the response held. The paper explained why in three sentences. Children store spoken rules in the verbal memory system. They store physical reflexes in the procedural motor system. The two systems do not communicate under arousal. In a real encounter, the brain pulls from the procedural drawer, which is built only through physical repetition with a model that approximates the real object. A child who has only ever been told the rule has the verbal drawer full and the procedural drawer empty. In the encounter, the procedural drawer is the one the brain opens. That is what I had watched my son do at the dinner table. He had pulled from the only drawer he had. And there had been nothing in it. The paper that documented this was published twenty two years ago. It has been cited in over a hundred follow up studies. The American Academy of Pediatrics knows about it. Pediatric trauma surgeons know about it. Law enforcement built every modern training protocol around it. Civilian parents have not been told. The school assembly my son sat through was not built on this research. The Eddie Eagle program was not updated to match this research. The four rules he has recited twenty seven times in our living room are the verbal layer of a curriculum that the research has shown for twenty two years does not install the response. Three generations of American children have been trained on the wrong system. I want to give you a comparison that broke this open for me. You did not teach your child to swim by reading him a book about swimming. You did not quiz him on water safety vocabulary. You did not give him a pamphlet titled "Stop, Float, Find an Adult" and consider him trained. You put him in a pool. You put your hands under his back. He kicked. He sank. You held him up. He kicked again. Six lessons later he was floating on his own. Twenty lessons later he was swimming. Every parent in America understands intuitively that swimming is not a verbal skill. It is a procedural one. It cannot be installed by talking about it. Then we hand the same children a curriculum for firearm safety that consists entirely of talking about it. And we are surprised that the recitation does not fire when the encounter comes. The intervention that has worked for swimming, for hundreds of years, is physical. Repetition. With a model. Under supervision. With feedback. That is the intervention the research said worked for firearm safety in 2004. And then almost nobody told the parents. I want to tell you what I tried before I figured out the answer. The week after the dinner table, I doubled down on the recitation. I drilled him on the four rules every morning at breakfast. I had him say them at bedtime. I quizzed him in the car. I thought, the way every parent in this situation thinks, that the problem was not enough recitation. He recited them perfectly. By Wednesday he could say them in order, backwards, and ranked by importance. I asked him my dinner table question again on Thursday. He froze for four full seconds before he started reciting. I had improved the recitation. I had not improved the response. I had drilled a deeper groove in the wrong file. I tried a second thing. I made it scarier. I told him stories about kids who had not known what to do. I showed him news clips. I crossed into territory I had spent eight years carefully avoiding, because I thought the problem was that he did not understand the stakes. He understood the stakes. He could repeat them back to me with the right facial expression. He still could not answer the question without first running the recitation. I tried a third thing. I had him watch the Eddie Eagle videos again. All of them. In a row. He recited the four rules along with the mascot in a singsong voice. He still could not answer the question. I tried a fourth thing. I bought him a book called "Toys, Tools, Guns, and Rules" by Julie Golob and we read it together every night for a week. The book is good. The book is well intentioned. The book is verbal. By the end of the week he could quote passages. He still could not answer the question. I tried a fifth thing. I had a long, calm, age appropriate conversation about the difference between toy guns and real guns, the difference between movies and real life, the difference between Fortnite and a real handgun. I used every metaphor I had read in three different parenting articles. He told me he understood. I asked the question. He froze for three seconds, looked at me, and said "wait, can I check my list." I had been trying to fix a procedural memory problem with five different versions of the same verbal intervention. I was sitting on my kitchen floor at 11pm one night, with the Julie Golob book open beside me and my laptop showing the same Reddit thread for the third time, crying, because I had finally understood that the entire toolbox I had been given as a parent for this specific problem was a toolbox of verbal tools, and the problem was not a verbal problem. Then I found one. A small group of trainers, gun owners, and parents had built what the research described. A kid scale handgun that operated like a real semi automatic. Working slide. Working magazine. Working safety. Working manual of arms. It fired soft rubber projectiles from spring loaded casings, so the child got the full cycle of fire, eject, reload, and clear, without any real firearm risk. The casings ejected the way real casings eject. The slide locked back the way a real slide locks back. The jams were real jams the child cleared the way real jams are cleared. It was the household equivalent of the SIRT pistol law enforcement has used internally for thirty years. I read about it for a week before I bought one. I cross referenced what it does against the BST literature I had been reading for three months. Every element checked out. Model approximation. Repeated rehearsal. Parent supervised feedback. Age appropriate scaling for the four to twelve window. It is called BlockBlaster. I bought one. We have been using it for four months now. My son thinks it is the coolest thing he owns. He asks to use it on more nights than I have agreed to. He loves the building. He loves the loading. He loves the part where the casing pops out and he gets to catch it. He does not know that what he is doing, three nights a week, on our kitchen table, is filling a drawer in his brain that was empty for eight years. He just knows he likes it. About six weeks in, he started self correcting muzzle direction without being told. Eight weeks in, he was clearing simulated jams faster than I was. Ten weeks in, on a random Wednesday at dinner, I asked him the question again. The same question I had asked him three months earlier. The question that had made him freeze and run the recitation. I asked it the same way. Casually. While he was eating spaghetti. The exact same set up. He did not freeze. He did not pause. He did not look at the ceiling. He did not say "wait, hold on." He said, "I'd put my hands down, back up, and find an adult." Then he went back to his spaghetti. That is not a recitation. That is not a list. That is a description of what his body would do. That is the difference between the empty drawer and the full one. The article with the full breakdown is below. https://block-blaster.com/pages/5reasonswhythisisthebestgunsafetyteachingtool If you have a child between the ages of four and twelve, you are inside the window the research identifies. If you have not run the dinner table test, you do not know which drawer your child has filled. Run it. Casually. While he is eating. Ask him, in the voice you use when you are asking something easy, what he would do if he saw a real gun at a friend's house. Watch his face for the next six seconds. If he freezes, if he says "wait, hold on," if he starts reciting the four rules as a substitute for the answer, you have just seen the empty drawer. The drawer can be filled. The research is twenty two years old. The protocol is well documented. The civilian version of the tool finally exists. It just was not on the shelf of the bookstore. Or in the school assembly. Or in any of the parenting articles that have shown up in your feed for the last decade. It is linked below. 👇 https://block-blaster.com/pages/5reasonswhythisisthebestgunsafetyteachingtool P.S. I do not make anything from any of this. I am writing it down because I am the parent who ran the test and saw the empty drawer at my own kitchen table, and I do not want any other parent to sit on their kitchen floor at 11pm crying with a stack of books that cannot solve the problem they are trying to solve. The dinner table test takes thirty seconds. Run it tonight. If your child passes it without the freeze, you do not need this letter. If he freezes, the article below will explain why, and what the corrected protocol looks like. https://block-blaster.com/pages/5reasonswhythisisthebestgunsafetyteachingtool P.P.S. If you ran the test and your child froze and you are reading this paragraph trying to figure out what to do, I want you to know two things. The first is that this is not a parenting failure. You delivered the curriculum you were given by every authority who claimed authority over this. The curriculum was the wrong one. The second is that the window is not closed yet. My son was eight when I ran the test the first time. He was eight when I ran it the second time. The drawer was empty in March and full by July. The window for installing this reflex runs through age twelve and stays open in narrower form after that. The tool is linked below. 👇 https://block-blaster.com/products/blockblaster-diy-ops-handle-set