By what they DON'T say, shall ye know them....

[unixronin]

The Second Amendment column in this month's issue of Guns & Ammo magazine mentions an interesting statistic, in the course of arguing that the Gun-Free School Zones Act may well have cost more children's lives than it has saved.

The statistic:   Between 1997 and 2002, 32 students were shot and killed in elementary and secondary schools across the US.

Sounds bad, doesn't it?  Makes it understandable why there's a lot of fuss on the subject, huh?

Here's what so interesting about that number:  During the same period, in the same schools, 53 students died playing football.  That's more than half again as many.

So why don't we have a football-free schools act, "for the sake of the children"?  Surely if it's killing 65% more students every year than those horrible, evil guns, football must be a really serious problem, right?

Simple.  We don't have a football-free schools act because it's not about preventing child deaths.  It's about exploiting child deaths to ban guns, regardless of how many children's lives that saves or costs.

So next time someone tells you that guns need to be banned "for the sake of the children", ask them how they feel about banning football.  Or any of the other causes that kill more kids every year than guns do -- bicycles, swimming pools, .........

Comments

You're Not Supposed to Notice That!

[bbwoof.livejournal.com]

If it were really about saving lives, we'd probably have noticed that every month our own highways kill more people than the 9/11 terrorists did.

How long before they declare the War on Automobiles?

Re: You're Not Supposed to Notice That!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think most of us have already noticed. And to be fair, that rate too has declined almost monotonically since, I think, 1937.

I don't think America would survive a ban on automobiles. Too much of the way America has been built is dependent upon personal transportation. The cost of building a public-transit system serving all of America's sprawling cities, extensive enough to reach everyone who now commutes to work by car or motorcycle and with enough capacity to take them all where they need to go, when they need to get there, and home again on time would bankrupt America.

Frankly, too, the accident rate isn't about the automobiles. It's about the drivers. Too many drivers are poorly skilled, distracted by other things (in-car TVs, cell phones etc), just plain not paying attention, or frankly not medically fit to be driving. If we set a higher standard of proficiency to acquire and keep a driving license, I'll bet the highway accident rate would go way down.

Of course, one of the things the gun control lobby likes to bring up is, "If guns were regulated as tightly as automobiles..." but if you actually make the comparison, it turns out guns are regulated much more tightly than automobiles already.