David Yamane

“A Gun is Not Fun” Conference Upcoming

One week from today, I will be participating in a conference on my home campus at Wake Forest University called “A Gun is Not Fun: Strategies to Keep Children Safe from Gun Violence.” I’m excited to have a voice in this conversation.

I posted some preliminary thoughts on my newly established Light Over Heat Substack, and also reposted my 2022 essay “What We Talk Abut When We Talk About ‘Gun Safety'” there.

A description of and registration information for the event follows. I don’t believe it will be recorded, but if you are near Wake Forest University next Monday, March 24th from 4-8pm, come on by!

The Wake Forest Center for Literacy Education is hosting its first annual Visiting Scholars Speaker Series and Community Networking Conference. on Monday, March 24, 2025. The event is free and open to the public. It will take place from 4:00 to 8:00 pm in Farrell Hall on the campus of Wake Forest University.

The specific topic of this year’s conference is titled “A Gun is Not Fun: Strategies to Keep Children Safe from Gun Violence.” 

The keynote speaker is William Electric Black, aka Ian Ellis James., a seven-time Emmy Award winning writer for his work on Sesame Street and current faculty member at NYU’s Tisch School. You can read more about his work here.

The focus of the conference is on gun violence awareness and prevention in relation to our youngest learners. The Center for Literacy Education is imagining this event as a conversation that intersects areas such as health literacy, information literacy, early literacy, and family literacy. 

Panelists are coming from all over the state to take part in this conversation. You can read their bios on the conference website. We invite you to join us and ask you to please consider sharing the flyer and website with any colleagues, students, and community members who might be interested. We ask that all attendees plan to register using the button at the top of the website.

8 comments

  1. But the problem with that “Title” is that guns are fun. I run a jr. program that starts with 8 yo and the smile on their face is amazing the first time they shoot a rifle. Trying to say they are not fun is self defeating and it needs to be done more from the point of view that people can get hurt so you have to follow some simple rules, (see the Eddie Eagle program). This program has been around for 25 plus years and it has been very successful in instilling responsibility and safety.

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    • I think it is just a basic unfamiliarity with firearms and a desire to do something good (child gun safety) but not knowing the best way to frame it. I think the title should actually be “A Gun is Not a Toy.”

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  3. Reviewing the comments over at Substack, I think you probably have this conference covered. All I would add is I suspect the people naming this conference probably have developed their concepts of gun ownership in the context of places like Baltimore or Albuquerque, where the exposure kids have to guns may be by virtue of Dad’s sock drawer or on the street with other youth, using guns for illicit purposes. With no traditional gun culture safety concepts. That’s a far cry from the Gun Culture 1.0 immersion of my youth, where handling guns was tied to a lot of mentoring. Not to mention a lot of shot up empty tin cans.

    Have fun!

    Liked by 1 person

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    • Definitely. The title comes from the title of a children’s book written by the keynote speaker. His heart is in the right place, but he’s connecting the infrequent accidental injuries and deaths from firearms among very young kids to the everyday gun violence that especially ravages disadvantaged communities in the US.

      Liked by 1 person

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