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

Oh, I forgot to mention ....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

...that while there is an increased awareness of the need for proper firearms storage, most of the implementation of that awareness is silly. For instance, the usual approach is to mandate trigger locks -- many of which are ineffective on many guns, many easily defeated, and some types of lock on some guns can even cause an accidental discharge if the firearm wasn't properly unloaded. But try proposing things like tax incentives for the purchase of more effective secure-storage measures such as safes, or sponsoring free firearms safety courses, and you run into a brick wall of opposition.
California could, for example, have required proof of completion of an NRA gun safety course for a firearms purchase; instead, California implemented the "Basic Firearms Safety Card", the test for which barely suffices to screen out the complete drooling idiots, and much of the information in which is incomplete, misleading, or flat-out incorrect. The booklet for it appears to have been written by someone who learned everything he or she "knows" about firearms from Hollywood movies and the nightly news.