What is the source for this number?
This number is wildly incorrect, by anyone’s statistics. Did you mean to say the average number of accidental shooting DEATHS of a child per year? If so, the number is still incorrectly low but not ridiculously low. However, if I’m a parent of a young child, I want to prevent my child from being shot at all.
I bet this doesn’t include kids shooting an adult, which also happens. Toddler who shot mom in store with gun in her purse, girl who shot instructor at gun range when she lost control of the weapon, toddler in TN who shot mom with gun he found under her pillow while she was napping, 2 year old in Alabama who shot his dad in the head, 11 year old kid in Arkansas who accidentally shot his dad in a Walmart parking lot are examples in the last couple of years And then there are all the parents who accidentally or intentionally shoot their kids.
Thanks for the clarification. My bad. OK, that make more sense as starting point of a policy. I was wondering about that because it did seem out of kilter with your other posts in terms of its broad sweep.
However, it still begs the question, why this for guns and for nothing else that kills people?
For example, should we not then take away all cars from homes where someone has been arrested for drunk driving? This is because 41% (I believe that is correct) of driving fatalities involve a multiple offense drunk driver, of which some 50% have suspended or revoked licenses, but are driving a family member’s car or their own car, which is jointly owned by a family member.
Shouldn’t the family be held responsible for ensuring the car is not accessible to that driver family member with a history of drunk driving who is living in the home?
And others advocated people get long jail sentences for even accidental gun use in the home, all the while drunk drivers kill 10,000 each year, which is almost the exact same as the annual number of non-suicidal, non-gang-related deaths caused by a gun. Thus, why not put the family members of drunk drivers in jail for not protecting their cars from a known drunk driving family member?
While we are at it, how about all knives from houses where a family member has been arrested or convicted of stabbing someone? With some 1500 stabbing deaths each year in the US, and god knows how many stabbings where the victim did not die, we could make good dent in the assault with a knife problem.
Seriously, if we are holding people responsible for accidents, then let’s do that all around when people die or get hurt, not just with guns.
NOTE: People are free to correct my numbers, as always, but the arguments would remain unaffected.
I assumed that awc wanted to give the number of children who were accidentally killed by guns. That number, for teh US, is on the order of magnitude of hundreds per year. But if we are honest about trying to figure out the societal cost of the ready availability of guns, we need to include also the kids accidentally shot by guns who didn’t die. Now we’re in the thousands, not the hundreds. We need to include suicides by gun. We need to include domestic violence by gun. We need to include crimes committed by criminals wielding stolen guns that were unsecured. We need to include all ages.
Awc wants to say that there is some societal cost for the ready availability of guns, but also a societal benefit. (And this is obviously correct.) He tells us that ~300,000 rapes are committed each year, and another ~210,000 are foiled by guns. I eye both of those numbers with large skepticism. Most rape attempts are not in situations where the rape could reasonably be foiled by a gun, even if the person attacked had a gun on their person.
I saw a Johns Hopkins stat that over 7,000 kids a year end up at the ER with gun related injuries.
Just listened to a press conference held in Roseburg by the police in which they discussed the law enforcement response to the shooting. They said that two detectives responded, and fired three rounds. The first two missed. The third hit the shooter who was in the hallway, but apparently not fatally because the shooter ran back into the classroom where he shot and killed himself.
So once again, we see that professionals with training and prepared for what they were facing, still failed to kill the shooter and in fact missed twice. Yet we have homeowners without professional training claim that if surprised in their homes, with no forewarning, they’d be able to take down the shooter.
The sound of one’s gun firing is usually enough to scare the intruder away.
I definitely would march. I’ve marched for various things over the years, going back to Vietnam protests when I was in Jr. High School.
I don’t vote for any candidate who is against stricter gun control. I also give money. Plus, I sign every petition that comes into my email from the various politicians and polticsl groups I support.
No doubt, but so is the sound of one’s voice usually enough to scare away the intruder. Criminals entering your home generally just want your stuff.
As someone said upthread, a loud dog barking will also typically do the trick.
I think I’d feel more confident about the voice protection if mine sounded like a big, burly man’s.
I’ve worked with a large number of criminals. Almost all who committed burglaries took pains to avoid homes where someone was present. The last thing they wanted to do was to shoot someone over a television set, an xbox, or some guns that they were trying to steal.
And, yes, dogs–even small ones–are a significant deterrent. So are things that make very loud noises, like home alarms, boat whistles, or even loud stereos.
This number is way off because of the discretion among coroners to label a death as “accidental” or as “homicide” in reports that show up in federal statistics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/children-and-guns-the-hidden-toll.html?pagewanted=all
The stories in this article are heartbreaking. And these are “responsible” gun owners who probably made sure their kids put on helmets to ride bikes or skateboard, not drug addicts passing out with guns on the table. But somehow they forget they left a gun sitting on a nightstand or in an unlocked drawer or think they are hiding it by sticking it under a couch cushion while they leave the room.
Other than the smartgun technology that would allow only the owner to fire the gun, I doubt there’s anything that could be enacted to protect kids from parents who keep loaded guns around within reach and forget that they’ve done so.
This is starting to sound like lecturing women on how not to get raped.
Sorry, but an intruder knows he is intruding and especially if he lives in a Castle Doctrine state, he takes his own chances with getting killed. I don’t expect anyone to go to the expense of, or plan their lives around protecting the intruder’s life. Let’s not forget who the victim is here.
Because breathalyzers can be installed in cars. We can’t install something in a gun that determines the user’s intentions.
Here it comes - should the parents be blamed? http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/07/health/oregon-shooting-parents-blame/
What are you basing that on, Cardinal? I have a CDC data file from 2011 on my desktop that says the number of child deaths (ages 1-14) due to “Accidental discharge of firearms” was 74.
I’m also guilty of not being activist on this issue. But, not to be a downer, a huge majority of Americans already want gun control. But it’s going to take a whole lot of money and power to make the pols as terrified of the public as they are of the NRA. We need to get as organized and focused as they are – one organization, not dozens or hundreds of separate voices. And as rich as they are. Pols need to believe that they’ll pay for opposing gun control with their jobs, as they now know they’ll pay for supporting it.
The CDC can’t go ferret out where a death was classified as a homicide by the coroner, but it was really an accidental shooting. Some are also classified as suicides when they were actually accidental. Some non-CDC research has shown that there are a lot of those two misclassifications in particular.
If by a huge majority you mean that according to Pew 50% said they favor Gun Control and 47% favor Gun Rights. And public opinion is shifting in favor of Gun Rights.
http://www.people-press.org/2015/08/13/gun-rights-vs-gun-control/#total