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

Re: Errrrr ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Um, Amigo? They have had demands for those very items, some national. Most of them have already been put into effect and there are quite a few schools where the parents have actually gotten football banned.

Hmmm -- now that you mention it, I recall hearing about one or two of those. I stand corrected on that point. Nevertheless, what protest there is, is on a much smaller scale, and it doesn't get 1% of the media blood-wallowing that school shootings do.

There is one hell of a difference between kids dying while involved in sports and kids dying by being shot by another kid. The fact that more kids were killed playing football than were killed by other kids going nuts with guns simply doesn't prove that people don't really care about kids dying, regardless of the fashion.

Absolutely. But most of those school-shooting deaths aren't kids bringing guns to school and shooting their schoolmates. Since school shootings became a media sensation, the majority factor has been J. Random Wacko deciding to go shoot up a school and commit "suicide by cop."

The Second Amendment has never applied to kids and I'm sure that you'd never advocate putting guns into the hands of children, other than in situations too terrible to contemplate.

Well, actually, I started shooting when I was 8 years old, and I've never felt the need to go on a killing spree. I think, properly taught, it can be as good a way as any other to teach discipline and responsibility. In principle, though, yes, I completely agree; I don't think any child in an urban setting should have access to a gun except under strictly-supervised conditions, except for the "situations too terrible to contemplate". (Look up the Merced pitchfork murders (http://www.lewrockwell.com/poe/poe1.html) for one such horrific case.) Rural settings are another case; I don't see a problem with a responsible and safety-trained 12-year-old going out to hunt rabbits with a .22 or pigeons with a .410 shotgun.

So why does the idea of not allowing guns on school grounds erk you so much?

Three reasons.
Firstly, because it means that our schools are defenseless, so when the aforementioned wacko decides to go out in a blaze of nationwide media attention by murdering 20 or so schoolkids, there's usually no-one there who can stop him.
Secondly, because it's not just "on the school grounds"; it creates legal problems for any law-abiding gun owners unfortunate enough to live within a thousand feet of a school, or have to pass within a thousand feet of one to reach their house.
And thirdly, because in the atmosphere of "zero tolerance", it leads to absurdities like a kid being suspended from school for drawing a police officer wearing his gun. Why did he draw this "violent" image? The teacher told everyone in the class to draw a picture of their hero. So he drew a picture of his dad.

While I think it's a misguided and ill-conceived law, I don't for one moment suggest that a kid bringing a gun to school other than for a good and school-approved reason shouldn't result in a very stern talk between the principal, the kid, and the kids's parents about how and where said kid got the gun and why he brought it to school, and possibly result in action against the parents for unsafe storage of a firearm if that turns out to be the case. But when we're suspending and expelling elementary-school kids merely for saying the word "gun", the tail is not just wagging the dog, it's bludgeoning it to death against the wall.


(As a point of information, the original article actually mentions a number of cases in which school shootings were limited or averted; in one of the cases cited, on a college campus, the news media made great play of the fact that the shooter was "tackled by several students", but somehow neglected to mention that he was "tackled" only after two other students went and got their own guns out of their cars and got the drop on him first.)