Accidental shootings of children are being undercounted.

arnisador

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Children and Guns: The Hidden Toll


"And there are far more of these innocent victims than official records show.

A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities. The killings of Lucas, Cassie and Alex, for instance, were not recorded as accidents. Nor were more than half of the 259 accidental firearm deaths of children under age 15 identified by The Times in eight states where records were available.

As a result, scores of accidental killings are not reflected in the official statistics that have framed the debate over how to protect children from guns."

So, the "negligible" number of deaths, as the gun lobbyists describe it, is not nearly as low as claimed.

"
The National Rifle Association cited the lower official numbers this year in a fact sheet opposing “safe storage” laws, saying children were more likely to be killed by falls, poisoning or environmental factors — an incorrect assertion if the actual number of accidental firearm deaths is significantly higher.In all, fewer than 20 states have enacted laws to hold adults criminally liable if they fail to store guns safely, enabling children to access them.

Legislative and other efforts to promote the development of childproof weapons using “smart gun” technology have similarly stalled. Technical issues have been an obstacle, but so have N.R.A. arguments that the problem is relatively insignificant and the technology unneeded.
Because of maneuvering in Congress by the gun lobby and its allies, firearms have also been exempted from regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission since its inception."

Ah yes, the NRA.

"
In Bexar County, Tex., for example, the medical examiner’s office issued a finding of homicide in the death of William Reddick, a 9-month-old who was accidentally killed on May 17, 1999, when his 2-year-old brother opened a dresser drawer while in the crib with him, grabbed a pistol and pulled the trigger.

But the next year, when Kyle Bedford, 2, was killed by his 5-year-old brother, who had found a gun on a closet shelf, the same office classified the death as an accident."
 

ballen0351

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Double and triple the number it's still very very low.
 

granfire

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semantics....

The scary part is that there is enough data on children getting shot (and survive) to establish a scientific course of how wounds heal compared to adults....

I think the statistics ought to reflect bonehead gun-keeping (AKA lack of control) in these cases....not whether it is a homicide or accident.
 

Bob Hubbard

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2 points.

1 - This needs to be accurately documented. You can't push for fixes if they seem insignificant, and better documentation would help all sides better understand the real scope of the problem.

2 - I don't make a distinction between accidental and intentional when I look at total deaths. Accident or not, dead is still dead.

If semantics are the issue, if conflicting criteria, etc, correct it, count them accurately, then we can see the true picture. Numbers I've seen were about 70 accidental deaths a year. 2x that is 140. 10x is 700. It's still a small number, however if the true number is closer to 10x than 2x it reinforces the need for pushing for more responsible storage and harsher penalties for failure. If it's 100x than we have a major problem in that the numbers have skewed so badly as to be untrustworthy, by either side.
 

ballen0351

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2 points.

1 - This needs to be accurately documented. You can't push for fixes if they seem insignificant, and better documentation would help all sides better understand the real scope of the problem.

2 - I don't make a distinction between accidental and intentional when I look at total deaths. Accident or not, dead is still dead.

If semantics are the issue, if conflicting criteria, etc, correct it, count them accurately, then we can see the true picture. Numbers I've seen were about 70 accidental deaths a year. 2x that is 140. 10x is 700. It's still a small number, however if the true number is closer to 10x than 2x it reinforces the need for pushing for more responsible storage and harsher penalties for failure. If it's 100x than we have a major problem in that the numbers have skewed so badly as to be untrustworthy, by either side.
Even 7000 in a country of 300 million is not a good reason to put limits on a Constitutional right
 

ballen0351

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Not even limits? Like safe storage or the like? This is OK with you?

How do you enforce a safe storage law? If all you care about is punishing a parent after they loose a child I don't think they care about your safe storage laws at that point.

Oh I forgot to answer the question. Yes I'm OK with it. 1 death is 1 to many but 700 even 7000 isn't enough to limit the constitution
 
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Tgace

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How do you enforce a safe storage law? If all you care about is punishing a parent after they loose a child I don't think they care about your safe storage laws at that point.

Don't you know...passing a useless law is DOING SOMETHING.

Its all about DOING SOMETHING...nothing useful but it's "something".
 

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Even 7000 in a country of 300 million is not a good reason to put limits on a Constitutional right

Not even limits? Like safe storage or the like? This is OK with you?

Reasonable storage and handling.

Not stuff like "Store the bullets in 1 lock box, the magazine in another, the hammer down the street at a neighbors, use triple hex encryption, a 15 minute access waiting period, and oh year, phone the FBI first" type crap.

No, no reason to limit a right. However, misconduct and incompetence and recklessness should be discouraged. The guy doing speed draws in his yard for example killed 3 kids last year. Practice that at a gun range with safety controls, etc. Just an example, and yes, the # is legit.

Kids confusing guns for toys, being able to reach into a dresser and pull out a loaded gun as easily as they'd grab dads socks, weapons left on urinals, or beds, all these are preventable situations. You don't need more laws, you need more education, and you need people to be responsible.
 

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Sorry! That is the racist/sexist/bigot answer... You can't expect people to be responsible, what are you, some kind of monster?

Why not? They expect us to be. :)
 
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arnisador

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[h=1]More Guns in U.S. homes, More Kids Getting Shot[/h]
A new study shows that the number of children wounded or killed by gunshots has been climbing in recent years, and that states with high gun-ownership rates also tend to have lots of childhood firearm injuries.


While such a conclusion may seem obvious, epidemiological research in this field has been lacking because of pressure from some members of Congress to limit federally funded gun research for the past two decades.

“Based on our research, we know that there is a clear correlation between household gun ownership (and gun safety practices) and childhood gunshot wounds in the home on a large-scale,” Madenci said
 

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arnisador

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Gee, I'm pretty sure you're one of those who has been heard to screech that correlation does NOT equal causation...

Correlation alone is not sufficient to establish causation. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to establish causation. Correlation is how we learn what to investigate further to see if there is indeed causation.
 

Tames D

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I believe in being responsible. I keep all my guns in a gun safe. Well, except for the chambered loaded Glock I keep on my headboard at all times.
Just kidding, I keep it on my nightstand ;)
 

billc

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Hmmmm...just try to get a firearm safety class into grade schools, as they have for fire safety, and the same gun grabbers who want to throw parents in jail will block them every time.

Here is a look at the issue...

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/op-eds/NROChildrenAndGuns051313.html

My research on juvenile accidental gun deaths for all U.S. states shows that mandates that guns be locked up had no impact. What did happen in states with such mandates, however, was that criminals attacked more people in their homes and crimes were more successful: 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurred each year in these states. Burglaries also rose dramatically. The evidence also indicates that states with the biggest increases in gun ownership have seen the biggest drops in violent crime.

Here is the paper he did on accidental gun deaths and gun locks...

http://johnrlott.tripod.com/whitney.pdf

One consequence from one size fits all laws like the gun grabbers want...

Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot. . . . Under the new “safe storage” laws being enacted in California and elsewhere, parents can be held criminally liable unless they lock up their guns when their children are home alone . . . so that’s just what law-abiding parents John and Tephanie Carpenter had done . . . . [The killer], who was armed with a pitchfork . . . had apparently cut the phone lines. So when he forced his way into the house and began stabbing the younger children in their beds, Jessica’s attempts to dial 9-1-1 didn’t do much good. Next, the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight. . . . [T]he children’s great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, told re- porters: “If only (Jessica) had a gun available to her, she could have stopped the whole thing. If she had been properly armed, she could have stopped him in his tracks.” “Maybe John William and Ashley would still be alive,” Jessica’s uncle said.38

Despite these different combinations, it is difficult to observe any evidence of reduced accidental gun deaths from the safe-storage law. Half the 16 coefficients are negative and half are positive, with the only statistically significant estimate implying that safe-storage laws increase accidental gun deaths. Some of the point estimates do imply a large percentage impact for the two youngest age groups, but the net effect on all four age groups added together is actually very small—resulting in four more accidental deaths (ignoring the even smaller estimates provided by the regressions with only the fixed effects: six lives saved for those ages 1–4 years, 12 more lives lost for those ages 5–9, 12 lives saved for those ages 10–14, and 10 more lives lost for those ages 15–19). The differential pattern for different age groups also seems inconsistent with what would be predicted from safe-storage laws.36
While increases in the accidental death rate from nongun methods for people in an age group is almost always positive, it is never statistically significant.

VI. Conclusion
Safe-storage laws have no impact on accidental gun deaths or total suicide rates. While there is some weak evidence that safe-storage laws reduce ju- venile gun suicides, those intent on committing suicide appear to easily substitute into other methods, as the total number of juvenile suicides actually rises (if insignificantly) after passage of safe-storage laws.

And there is always a cost on the other side of the argument of storage laws...but victims on that side are never examined...except by this paper...

Our most conservative estimates show that safe-storage laws resulted in 3,738 more rapes, 21,000 more rob- beries, and 49,733 more burglaries annually in just the 15 states with these laws. More realistic estimates indicate across-the-board increases in violent and property crimes. During the 5 full years after the passage of the safe- storage laws, the 15 states faced an annual average increase of 309 more murders, 3,860 more rapes, 24,650 more robberies, and over 25,000 more aggravated assaults.

The impact of safe-storage laws is consistent with existing research in- dicating that the guns that are most likely to be used in an accidental shooting are owned by the least law-abiding citizens and thus are least likely to be locked up after the passage of the law. The safe-storage laws thus manage to produce no significant change in accidental deaths or suicides and yet still raise crime rates because households with low accidental death risks are now the ones most likely to obey the law.
 
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billc

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And an actual look at the Times article...

http://bearingarms.com/no-accidental-honesty-in-the-ny-times-latest-hit-piece-on-guns/

They also failed to report the much larger truth of the matter that regardless of which criteria you use, both the per-capita rate and total number of child gun deaths in every age group is in a steady decline based on the most recent available data from the Center for Disease Control collected between 1999-2010. Further, honest reporters would admit that the documented declines in youth firearms deaths are occurring in a nation where gun ownership and shooting sports participation is on a dramatic rise, in youth, female and urban shooters.
In short, this Times article is anti-gun propaganda that purposefully obfuscates empirical data showing child gun deaths from every cause are on a long and steady decline.

Again, if you are concerned about accidental gun deaths among children under a certain age...grade school level here in the states...then the common sense move would be to start incorporating gun safety into their yearly fire safety lectures by the local fire department...that would go a long way to keeping children safe...but that isn't the real goal is it. The real goal is to scare people into not owning guns by hyping the death of children and then to scare parents with long jail terms if there is a tragedy in their family when a child under a certain age mishandles a gun. The times I have seen gun safety programs tried in schools they are stopped if the NRA, which has a well developed gun safety program, has any connection to it. So before they throw out the deaths of children to push their anti-gun agenda...start by supporting gun safety programs in schools...that is if protecting innocent children is the actual goal...

Found this article...this is how they dealt with gun accidents in the 1950s

http://life.time.com/history/gun-control-1956-edition-teaching-firearm-safety-in-indiana-photos/#1

As LIFE put it in “Drawing a Bead on Safety,” all those years ago (citing a statistic that is still appalling today):
In 1954 more than 550 U.S. children under 15 were killed in accidents involving the careless handling of firearms, five of them in lake County, Indiana. [In 2010, 606 people were killed by "accidental discharge of firearms," according to the CDC. — Ed.] This situation shocked Indiana Conservation Officer Rod Rankin, who decided to offer a course in gun safety to any interested child in the county. In the past year 2,500 children from 6 years on, with the approval of their parents, have taken him up on it.
Rankin stresses two things: never point as gun at anybody, even in play, and always check immediately to see if the gun is loaded … Rankin is glad to answer routine questions such as “How fast and far does a bullet go?” but tries to discourage ones like “Have you ever shot anyone?” and “If you shoot a man in the head how long does it take him to die?”
Some people think Rankin is starting the kids on firearms too young. But the National Rifle Association points out that four states now permit gun safety courses in grade school and says, “The earlier a kid learns to respect a gun and what not to do with it the better chance natural curiosity won’t get him in trouble.”
Love or hate the NRA, it’s hard to argue with a logic that stresses education and safety around firearms.

Read more: Gun Control, 1956 Edition: Teaching Firearm Safety in Rural Indiana | LIFE.com http://life.time.com/history/gun-co...rearm-safety-in-indiana-photos/#ixzz2jUNPWuZr
 
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billc

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Another look at the article from Business Week...

http://www.businessweek.com/article...re-are-encouraging-trends-too-statistics-show

3. And, by the way, what’s the overall trend in child gun deaths, accidental or otherwise? That’s a question I had early on as a reader of the nearly 6,000-word article. (Actually, I knew the answer and wondered when theTimes would get around to revealing it.)
Only in the 75th paragraph of a 110-paragraph article does the newspaper acknowledge in an offhand way “the deep decline in accidental gun deaths shown in federal statistics dating to the mid-1980s.” Huh? So, even if some accidents are categorized incorrectly as homicides, something good seems to be happening.
The Times didn’t offer any specifics. Why not? They’re not difficult to find. The Centers for Disease Control website provides one statistical snapshot (PDF): From 1999
through 2010, child gun deaths attributed to accident, homicide, and suicide all declined (although the absolute levels are still alarmingly high). What’s more, the reduction in minors killing each other and themselves mirrors a broader and deeper decrease (PDF) in all firearm crime in the U.S. since 1993. I didn’t notice a reference in the Times to this heartening overall violent-crime trend.
 

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