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Portrait Of Shirtless Boy Holding Toy Gun Against Green Wall During Sunny Day

Source: Artyom Chuguevsky / EyeEm / Getty

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) – Nine-year-old Aiden Roberts is a graduate from a gun safety class near Mint Hill – tailored to kids like him.

“There was no other class like this,” Michael Pegram of Echo Firearm Training says. “So, I decided to come up with it.”

There, the children spend four hours, both in classroom time, and shooting.

“It’s the parents’ choice of what their kids should be around,” Pegram says. “I’m just offering a class to let them learn to be safe, if they’re going to be around them.”

They work from a Nerf gun, Pegram says, to a .22, or nine-millimeter.

Some students are as young as six, he says.

“A lot of times they’re not shooting a nine-millimeter,” Pegram says. “But once in a blue moon, if they know what they’re doing, and I know they can do it, we have done that.”

Pegram has had some social media feedback.

“Usually there’s an extreme on either side,” he says. “People are extremely against it, or they’re extremely for it.”

WBTV asked parents about this Monday. Some sounded alarmed by the ages of the children.

“My daughter’s five years old,” dad Bryan Moore says. “And thinking of her shooting a gun, it’s kind of crazy.”

“It seems like a bad idea,” Rebekah Biercz says.

But, they also were considering the potential benefits for older kids.

“If we’re going to have guns in this country, one of the things we need is really strict training classes,” Biercz says.

“On one hand, maybe it’s good to teach gun safety,” Moore says. “But then on the other hand, that would be my one concern, is it would make kids comfortable handling guns, and could lead to more accidents, possibly.”

 

READ MORE: Cleveland19.com

Article Courtesy of WBTV-TV Charlotte and WOIO 19 News Cleveland

First Picture Courtesy of vitapix and Getty Images

Second Picture Courtesy of Artyom Chuguevsky / EyeEm and Getty Images

Tweet and Video Courtesy of Twitter, WBTV-TV Charlotte, and WOIO 19 News Cleveland

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