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, .........
