The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students

[SecularMotion]

Guns and kids: the youngest casualties of America's infatuation with firearms

The cover of the recent Children's Defense Fund report (pdf) on gun violence in the United States carries a single statistic:

The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each.

That's just a more dramatic way of stating an already staggering figure – 2,694 in 2010. Most of the report's 73 following pages are devoted to restating it. Sometimes, this done to illustrate the chilling frequency of such deaths:

• One child or teen died every 3 hours and 15 minutes
• Seven children and teens died every day, more than 20 every three days
• Fifty-one children and teens died every week

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/10/guns-kids-casualties-america

[billh58]

1. According to the NRA and its

Gungeoneer supporters, these 'facts" are irrelevant and just the price we must pay for our Second Amendment freedom to kill and main other Americans with lethal weapons on a daily basis. It's the "American Way," and our deadly gun culture must not be "controlled" by people who don't truly understand guns, how they function mechanically, which gun features assist with more accurate kills, and all of the good and warmth that they bring into our lives.

[GreenStormCloud]

2. The vast majority of that is gang warfare.

Does anybody believe that passing a law that would make having and carrying a gun more difficult for me (Perfectly clean police record, no history of violence, 67 years old) would have any effect on the Bloods, Crips or any of the other violent gangs?

[CTyankee]

3. Oh, I am so relieved! It's only those people...

whew! It's not my problem...

[GreenStormCloud]

4. You didn't answer the question.

How would restricting MY guns have any effect on the gangs?

[CTyankee]

5. you know the answer because you have read it any number of times on gun threads...but I will say

what we used to say back in the anti-war days: "If you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."

[billh58]

7. The part that's

always missing from that tired old argument, is: the guns that the Crips and the Bloods use once belonged to someone who purchased them legally. The "legal" purchasers either sold, gave, or "lost" their guns to criminals while exercising their Second Amendment rights to enable the gun culture and gun violence in this country.

Gunners were allowed to transfer these "legal" guns to criminals because the NRA has purchased enough politicians over the years to defeat any sort of sane legislation that would make the tracking and accountability of guns a commonplace practice. Instead, the American version of an open black market for guns is a thriving business in this country, and the NRA and its apologists rejoice in the ensuing violence because it gives them an excuse to enact SYG and CCW laws so that the "good guys with a gun" can strut their stuff. Case in point: Trayvon Martin and the Gungeoneer's hero -- Georgie Zimmerman.

"My right to own a gun trumps your right to life," so say the cold-dead-hands gun nuts who fill our streets with guns, both "legal" and illegal on a daily basis.

[DanTex]

12. Actually, gangs account for about 12% of all homicides.

The total number of gang homicides reported by respondents in the NYGS sample averaged more than 1,900 annually from 2007 to 2011. During the same time period, the FBI estimated, on average, more than 15,500 homicides across the United States (www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1). These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 12 percent of all homicides annually.
Highly populated areas accounted for the vast majority of gang homicides: nearly 70 percent occurred in cities with populations over 100,000, and 19 percent occurred in suburban counties in 2011.

http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Survey-Analysis/Measuring-the-Extent-of-Gang-Problems

Not that it matters, because people killed by gangs are still people, regardless of how little you care about them.

As far as whether a law specifically targeting you as an individual, that probably wouldn't make much difference. But if the law applied to everyone, and not just you, then yes it would make a difference.

[MisterP]

8. ...and its new CO state senators *shiver*

[aikoaiko]

6. True if you include 18 and 19 year old adults...

...and make them sound like school age kids.

[otohara]

9. Parents of 18/19 Yr Olds

Don't care if they are 12 or 19.
My friend who's 9 year old was shot in the head would still be a broken woman if he would have been college age.

Imagine the visual of your child's brains being splattered in an instant.

[aikoaiko]

13. And I'm sure that's true of 20, 30, and 40+ year old children of parents.

[Lizzie Poppet]

15. Ah, but being straightforward about that destroys the emotional appeal.

Adorable, innocent schoolchildren evoke strong protective instincts in the vast majority of people. If the controllers can establish an association between those homicide numbers and those adorable kids (despite such an association's nebulous-at-best connection to reality), it's effective stuff.

[Robb]

10. K&R.

[DanTex]

11. This graph pretty much says it all.

Amazing that the NRAers are still trying to tell us that this isn't a big deal.

[ileus]

14. Wonder if they even realize the guns didn't kill anyone?