It's not just scary gunz - when my son was in middle school, ~10 years ago, there were kids in his class that were not allowed to use the stove. It's the "Must Protect Baby From Everything" mindset, and the term "Baby" applies to your kids, regardless of age.
I can certainly understand a parent wanting to ensure that their child does not injure themselves thru uneducated misadventure. I would think that a certain degree of attention demands to be paid when teaching a youngster the finer points of safely running a chainsaw or any other hand size power tool for example.
When I was 7 1/2 years old, I was allowed to drive a Ford 8N tractor during tobacco harvest season and had a very enjoyable time in the process. I would guess that by today's expectations of what is considered correct parental oversight one would be arrested for child abuse if they allowed their child to do the same thing. That would be an unfortunate turn of events as I still recall those days with a smile on my face 63 years later.
All the nephews in the extended family have been introduced to the safe and responsible usage of guns in various shapes and sizes when they were in the 10- to 12-year-old range if I recall their ages correctly.
One nephew joined the National Guard and ended up being deployed to Afghanistan during the early days of the war there. Prior to leaving the US he gathered his platoon together on the firing range and reminded the members that their ability to manage small arms in a competent manner was no longer just a passing academic exercise.......their lives were about to depend on their very ability to do so. They spent some quality time reacquainting themselves with the finer points of operating their personal weapons.
This is a case where his being taught about firearms by the family when he was a young man turned out to be a decided lifesaving skill later on in his life. He told me that when they left the base, he made a point of loading whatever vehicle they were traveling in with essentially as much ammo and grenades as was possible to stuff in it because he was aware that the Hollywood depiction of a single soldier holding off a horde of unwashed enemy with a 7 shot .45 pistol was utter bullshit.
I offered to lend him my Sig Sauer 226 before he deployed because I had read that his issue Berreta was not the most reliable pistol in a hostile environment, but he informed me that the army told him if he arrived in theater with a non-issue pistol they would confiscate it. As it turned out he had to field strip both the rifle and pistol on a daily basis and in the case of the Berreta had to stretch the magazine springs daily so that it would feed reliably in light of the environment he was working in.
Shortly after returning from Afghanistan he was deployed to Iraq. Again, his childhood training in firearms combined with his recent experiences on the first deployment combined to help him survive both deployments and come home with his entire platoon in one piece.
The late Colonel Jeff Cooper was once asked what his approach to raising his 3 children was and he replied that teaching them to ride, shoot straight and tell the truth was the essence of his philosophy on proper parenting. In light of the present trajectory of our society today.........I think that is a very sound approach to trying to impart the necessary survival skills to one's offspring.
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