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

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

[posted separately due to the infernal 4300-character limit]

In related news, I've been reading Bellesiles' Arming America.

Um, would it be considered unfair to point out that not only has Bellesiles' book been utterly discredited, but in fact the awards that he was initially given for it have been revoked, and the university at which he held a history chair at the time of writing it asked for (and received, with very ill grace) his resignation because it was such a slovenly piece of scholarship?

Much of Arming America was tantamount to asserting that virtually no Americans keep dogs on the grounds that dogs rerely appear as bequests in wills. He in large part based the premise for his research on the a priori assumption that firearms were rare enough that every firearm would be specifically mentioned in a will somewhere, rather than in such common possession that fathers would give their sons a musket or fowling-piece and think nothing of it.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

Certainly not unfair--having no credentials at all to evaluate work in this field, I welcome your input. I'll be checking into it on my own, too.