My daughter is adopted from China. I don't remember anything related to firearms on the questionaires. We had to jump through endless hoops though.
Some of these social workers create a reality all their own. In the questionaire and autobiography, the woman doing our home study discovered that my father had disciplined me by whipping me with a belt. I truthfully answered her follow up questions, revealing that he had whipped me hard enough to draw welps and blood, and had also hit me. This social worker was not a direct employee of the adoption agency, but held a MSW and was privately contracted to do home studies. Despite the fact that I had 20 years of teaching experience, 10 of which were with elementary children, and had worked with preschoolers for a summer while directing a daycamp for a city rec. dept., and had numerous letters of recommendation from fellow teachers and principals, this woman was convinced that "People who were abused by their own parents, also abuse their own children, therefore you are not qualified to be a parent." She was going to recommend against us based solely on this one issue (my wife is an elementary teacher too). I had to schedule a meeting with the director of the agency, and remind her that in our country, individuals are judged on their own merit, not by the "sins of their fathers". I told her that the social worker was brainwashed with modern psychology's notion of "victimization": that as a victim, I was predestined to be like my father. I told her that I did not see myself as a victim and practiced individual responsibility: I am responsible for my own actions and I decided to be different than my parents and lived in a very happy marriage, behaving responsibly-completely different than my parents. I went on to say that with my record as a teacher, and with American jurisprudence being based solely on the actions of the individual, I knew that if I had to resort to litigation regarding the issue, the agency would easily lose any lawsuit I brought against them. The agency agreed with us hands down. If my wife and I had not had excellent long track records as teachers, however, who knows. Things shouldn't be this way.
So you never know what any one social worker might have in his/her head as a prejudice against you. I gave up my guns long ago, but gun owning is a constitutional right and people should not be judged as falling short when the lives they lead are in compliance with the law. It could be possible that you get a s.w. who grew up in the country and doesn't care at all about guns. Our s.w. had no qualms with our adoption being inter-racial, but there are other s.w.s who might see it as a big issue. As was said earlier, be truthful, but don't give anything more than the basic facts. Don't offer unnecessary tidbits that could be bait for a fishing expedition. I would not encourage threatning lawsuits unless that is the last resort as it was for us. And if you have to, make sure you do it in a way that shows your logic and also shows that you consider it a last resort that you'd really prefer not to carry out.
