Family Intro to Firearms: Fun for the Whole Family?

“How many barrels?” asked Family Intro to Firearms instructor Steve “Pancho” Harpham.

“Two!” hollered the four families in attendance at the Denver metro-area gun safety class.

“How many triggers?” Harpham called out.

“Two!” the class, again, chorused. 

The call-and-response about the anatomy of a shotgun came towards the end of the classroom portion of the Family Intro to Firearms course at Bristlecone Shooting in Lakewood on Feb. 16. Two rows of desks faced Harpham’s PowerPoint presentation about basic gun safety protocols, common causes of firearm accidents and the breakdown of different categories of firearms. 

“My passion is teaching the next generation and beginners safe and responsible use of firearms,” said Harpham, who has been teaching gun safety to youth for 17 years. “I know that the people that I am teaching are learning safety and starting the path to being a safe and responsible gun owner. It’s rewarding at that level.”

A whiteboard listed the class’ goals for the session, and a metal rack on the far side of the classroom housed stacks of papers offering various resources, as well as several beat-up-looking bowling pins. The room’s walls were adorned with posters outlining legal requirements for the use of deadly force, levels of situational awareness and suicide prevention strategies. 

After two hours of reviewing gun safety, firearm parts, proper shooting form and range rules, the class was ready to hit the range. Accompanied by their parents, the students, ranging from 10 to 18 years old, filed into the small buffer room, which regulates the airflow and temperature on the range. 

Harpham tells the class they’ll be shooting in two groups: parents and kids. Everyone forms a semicircle around the instructor while he explains how to remove the ammunition from the box, snap ten rounds into the magazine and then load the magazine into the Ruger 10-22 rifle. 

The kids went first. Once everyone had adjusted their stool height, arranged their sandbags and checked their sights, they set their targets at 10 yards away. “Ready!” Harpham said into the earpiece. “Commence firing!”

After 10 rounds, the targets came streaming back to the families, everyone eager to inspect the damage. Exclamations from the kids, many of whom were thrilled to have hit a few bullseyes, were met with proud smiles from parents and enthusiastic encouragement from Harpham.

“It was really fun,” said Jeremiah Palma, 11. “Taught us how to shoot guns and stuff.” For some students, like Jeremiah, this was their first time shooting a gun. Others had a little more experience. All of the kids lived with at least one firearm at home, which was the driving reason for attending the Bristlecone course.

At a time when gun violence rates in the U.S. are among the highest they’ve ever been and states are largely responsible for crafting their own gun laws, the course provides Colorado youth with both education around firearm safety and a point of access to shooting. 

Why Bristlecone Teaches Gun Safety to Kids

Bristlecone Shooting was founded by Jacquelyn Clark and her husband Brian in 2012. The Clarks first got into shooting after a home invasion scare in Atlanta; Jacquelyn said they were hiding behind their bed with a golf club for seven minutes while they waited for law enforcement to arrive.

After the incident, she and her husband decided to look into buying guns and quickly “fell in love” with target shooting. “It was a real watershed moment,” Clark said.

When the couple moved to Colorado a few years later, Clark couldn’t find any “family friendly” shooting ranges on the west side of Denver. So, the pair decided to found Bristlecone.

Bristlecone has offered the Family Intro to Firearms class since it opened. The course is open to kids ages 10 and up who are accompanied by a parent and is designed to introduce children to firearms in a safe and professional environment. Clark said that class participation has been steady over the past twelve years, with 85 kids and parents taking the class in 2024. 

“Most of the families that are in this class have firearms in the home, or they know that their kids have friends who have it in their home,” Clark said. “We want to make sure that the kid is old enough to understand the gravity of what they’re being taught, be respectful and understand the etiquette associated with the range.” 

Harpham agreed. He sees the class as an opportunity for kids to unlearn bad habits and unrealistic expectations about guns and approach firearms with a focus on respect. Many kids, he pointed out, play shooting video games, which set a dangerous standard for gun use.

“The solution to every problem in those video games is shooting it,” Harpham said. “That’s the opposite of reality. In this Family Intro to Firearms class, we’re not talking to kids about ‘Here’s a gun. You’re going to use it for protection.’ We are introducing them to the safe and responsible use of it as a life skill.”

Bristlecone also offers an alternative family class that uses a plastic replica of a firearm and a computerized simulator. “Some people aren’t ready for the live fire,” Clark said. “They just want to learn about safety features of firearms theoretically and go through the classroom part and maybe learn how to grip (the gun) and hold it.” This option, said Clark, is far less popular than the live-fire version.

A changing political landscape

Gun safety is a divisive topic in both national and state politics. In 2024, an estimated 48% of American households reported owning a gun, according to Gallup polling. At the same time, guns were the leading cause of death among American children aged 1 to 17, beating out cancer and car crashes, and rates of gun homicides in the U.S. outpaced other high-income countries by a factor of 25.

Just last week, the Colorado state senate passed SB 25-003, a controversial bill that would ban the sale and purchase of semi-automatic firearms with detachable magazines with exemptions for Coloradans who take a safety course and undergo a criminal background check.

Concealed carry in Colorado is also limited to residents who pass a safety course and obtain a permit. In 2023, the state raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21, which was temporarily blocked by a federal judge before going into effect late last year. Minors can still use firearms with adult supervision for recreational purposes, including hunting, target shooting and taking classes like those offered at Bristlecone.

Across state lines, gun laws look very different. A 2022 Supreme Court ruling found “may-issue” jurisdiction unlawful. This required gun owners to show proper cause to receive a concealed carry permit. Today 29 states have no restrictions on concealed carry. The steady upward trend in firearm deaths since 2000, paired with a lack of political will to implement public health and research-based solutions, has led some to term the bleak landscape America’s “gun violence epidemic.” 

Against this backdrop, Clark insisted that the family class enhances, not diminishes, community safety. “Kids don’t always learn the best from their parents,” Clark said. “If the guns are in the house anyways, are we trusting the parents to teach the safety, or do we want somebody who’s an expert or certified instructor teaching those safety rules?”

Why take the class?

Lauren Eytcheson, 18, attended the class on Feb. 16 alongside her 14-year-old brother and both of their parents. Since she’s over 18, she technically could have come to the range on her own time, but she wanted to go with her family. 

“We don’t usually get to do a bunch of fun family stuff. It’s a nice little bonding experience,” Lauren said, adding that they decided to take the class because her younger brother, Evan, doesn’t have any firearm experience. “We do have guns in the house and we are worried,” Lauren said. “If something happens and it gets left out, if he figures out the code, I think it’s good for him to know what to do in that situation.” 

The Eytchesons, who moved to Superior in 2022, own 11 guns. 10 are kept locked in a gun safe in their garage, and Kate Eytcheson, Lauren’s mom, keeps her handgun in another locked safe next to her bed.

Before she bought her first gun, Kate knew several victims of fatal gun accidents: a three-year-old boy from her Bible study group in Georgia who accidentally shot and killed himself, and her cousin, who was fatally shot by his pawn shop co-owner while handling a shotgun he thought had no ammunition. Kate knew she didn’t want to keep any guns in the house unless she knew how to use them, so she took a concealed carry course and started practicing.

“They always tell you, to go to the range and practice,” Kate said. “Especially if you’re going to carry a gun, you have to. Otherwise, you get in a situation and you’re like, ‘Oh, crap!’ It’s not natural.”

Mariah Lezaima, Jeremiah’s mom, signed up for similar reasons. Lezaima, a single mother, owns a handgun, which she says she purchased for home protection. She saw this class as an opportunity to introduce her son to gun safety in a classroom setting.

“They recommend learning rifles before pistols for kids. Eventually, when he gets a little more practice with this, I’ll probably teach him how to use my pistol,” Lezaima said. “If I had a different kid and I felt like they weren’t mature enough to take this class, then obviously I wouldn’t, but for him specifically, I feel like maturity-wise he was ready to learn.”

Both Lezaima and Kate said they felt safer with a firearm in their home, a view reflected by 64% of Americans according to a 2023 Gallup poll. However, this belief collides with a well-established body of public health research showing that the presence of a firearm in a home increases the risk of suicide, domestic homicide and accidental shootings for its inhabitants.

These risks can be mitigated through “safe storage,” like a firearm safe or a gun lock. Colorado is one of four states with the strictest level of Child Access Prevention Laws, which are designed to prevent families from leaving weapons accessible to children. Both mothers acknowledged the risk of keeping a firearm at home, but Lezaima was still primarily concerned with outside forces.

“I honestly probably don’t think I do what I’m supposed to do, but like I said, it’s just me and my kid at home,” Lezaima said. “So, yes, I can keep this gun locked up, but in the event that I needed it in my house, then what? It’s not easily accessible. (My son and I) have had that conversation where I’m like, ‘Hey, I keep this in this spot; I don’t keep it loaded, but you don’t touch this. You don’t come in here. This is not a toy.’”

Accidental shootings are not the only gun-related public health concern in question. School shootings are not new to Colorado, which witnessed the Columbine Massacre, one of the first school shootings in the country, in 1999. More recently, Colorado has seen several high-profile mass shootings, namely the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, the 2021 King Soopers shooting in Boulder and the 2022 shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs. 

Is Bristlecone putting guns in the hands of the youth? Technically, yes, but Clark says that this misses the point. 

“I think you have to lead with education. That’s the biggest thing that we can do for the community. We, as the expert, as a part of the community, can be the first out there promoting safety and responsible firearm ownership and responsible secure storage,” Clark said. “We’ve got to police our own in this community. I believe that starts with youth, but really education at every level seems like the biggest step that I can make.”

Harpham acknowledged that school shootings were an issue but focused on training and safety measures for individual gun owners. 

“[Firearm] access is absolutely part of the solution,” said Harpham, though he remained wary of what he called the “slippery slope” of legislation regulating access. The instructor went on to point to security and training as other possible avenues to reduce school shootings while preserving Second Amendment gun ownership rights.

Fears, real and perceived

One unspoken topic wormed its way into almost every conversation on the range: fear. 

“Probably three-quarters of the people that come here are driven here by wanting to be safer and wanting to have additional tools on their tool belt that can make them safer if the unthinkable comes to their world,” Harpham said. 

In 2024, 72% of firearm owners cited protection as a major reason for owning a gun, while 32% and 30% named hunting and sports shooting as major reasons, respectively. While these figures match the public perception of crime (which rose to an all-time high in 2022), they look very different than they did 25 years ago.

According to Gallup, two-thirds of gun owners listed both target shooting and protection from crime as reasons for owning a gun in 2000, while in 1994 just 48% of gun owners said they owned a gun for a reason other than recreational shooting.

Protection was the driving reason Lezaima, Lauren and Kate carried or planned on carrying a firearm. Kate bought her first gun during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests because she felt unsafe. When it came to describing why she felt threatened, Kate turned more vague, saying she was worried about coming across “a weird riot mob” while driving and that there were “a lot of weird things happening in the world.”

“I have no intention of shooting anybody. But maybe if I had a gun, maybe that would make it better?” Kate said uncertainly.

The state of the world was similarly concerning to Lezaima, who called it “crazy.” Lauren named “the future we’re going into” as one of the reasons she’s considering getting her concealed carry permit when she turns 21. What about the future exactly? 

“Guns are becoming more common,” said the 18-year-old. U.S. gun manufacturing peaked in 2021 with 23.4 million guns hitting the domestic market.

Despite perceptions of higher crime, violent crime and property crime rates have decreased sharply since the 1990s, according to data from the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), with the overall violent crime rate falling 49%. 

While taking questions at the very end of the course, Harpham asked the class who had pulled their gun that day to defend themselves. When no one raised their hand, Harpham reminded the class that everyone uses situational awareness to protect themselves every day, whether they know it or not. 

“We aren’t promoting that you need to have a handgun to be safe,” Harpham said. “Here’s a whole litany of other options that you can use first, and it starts with not getting into a bad situation.”

Lauren, for one, was still trying to figure out whether carrying a firearm was the best way for her to stay safe. “Is it necessary?” she questioned. “Or can I find another way?”