Francis Wilkinson; gun owners put children at risk
This Francis Wilkinson person wrote in Bloomberg News that, even though there are “many” responsible gun owners, others are not and don’t keep guns out of the hands of children. Of course, he needs some shocking statistics;
According to Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America (both supported by Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News), from December 2012 to December 2013, at least 100 children died in unintentional shootings.
I’ll concede that even one is too many, but seeings how there are an estimated two hundred and seventy million guns in the hands of private legal owners, 100 would seem a little low, in fact, it would make most Americans proud of their countrymen for keeping the number so low. But, you know, given his sources for that 100 children, I’d have to find another set of numbers before I’d believe it.
Wilkinson clearly has an axe to grind. Looking at his body of work at Bloomberg, he’s one of those guilt-ridden liberals who hate everything about America, particularly conservative America. I even found an article he wrote at Huffington Post where he claims that “Guns are for White People” and his conclusion arising from buying gun magazines. Despite the fact that with 270 million guns out there, I’m sure there a black person or two who legally own firearms – in fact I know a couple of them.
So he clearly has a blind spot when it comes to guns and the second amendment. He continues with his latest rant and guns within reach of a statistically miniscule number of children and he characteristically blames the NRA.
While kids have been killing themselves and others, the gun movement has been working to expand gun culture in public schools. The National Rifle Association has long had its Eddie Eagle program, educating the very young in gun safety (and, not incidentally, gun familiarity). After the Newtown massacre, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre characteristically demanded guns in schools.
Imagine that! Someone who voluntarily teaches gun safety in schools at no cost to the taxpayers. That’s outrageous! Oh, by the way, Mr. Wilkinson, even though the NRA wants more guns in school, they don’t advocate leaving the guns laying around within reach of the students – ideally, those guns in schools would be in the possession of legally-licensed and trained professionals. Do you even know any?
LaPierre is a cheerleader for dystopia because scaring people out of their wits is the essence of his job. Yet the armies of Adam-Lanza-like zombie killers have failed to materialize. Instead, we have only a relentless series of stupid gun deaths, many due to people who were too reckless to be responsible gun owners in the first place. The federal government has no comprehensive tally. But if you follow Twitter feeds such as that of Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, you can watch the fatalities mount.
Yeah, well, if you followed the Twitter feed of This Ain’t Hell, for more than three years we’ve published, nearly daily, local new articles about legal gun owners who have protected their children and themselves from criminals with gun. That’s more than a thousand, and it probably just scratches the surface of the number of those types of incidents – because we depend on local news producers to think the story is important enough to publish. More than a thousand stories about armed citizens doing for themselves what the government can’t do for them. Good guys with guns.
Mr. Wilkinson, you should go pound sand, please.
Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists
Well dammit. Guess we’re going to have get rid of cars too. Those nasty things kill kids too.
And swimming pools, fire, poisons and things that might suffocate them
http://www.childdeathreview.org/nationalchildmortalitydata.htm
it’s from 2010, but I bet it hasn’t changed that much
Yep. A mortality rate of 0.2. Nothing like starting at the bottom and working your way up. Thing is, with these idiots, they tend to stay at the bottom.
(feeding, that is)
And, doctors and hospitals. Don’t forget stairways, those are deadly, too.
I’ll bet he doesn’t know one single person that owns a gun.
Maybe we should introduce ourselves to him…
I agree Jonn, one is too many. However when they toss out numbers like that absent any real context of the individual incidents, or compared to other means by which children accidentally die in that same time period they are being far from genuine in their concern for the lives of children. It is not the children that they care about, they are just a prop in their drama fest.
It is less than 1% of all childhood deaths. I don’t know where they got the numbers for 2012-2013 but the CDC Numbers for 2011 are all I can find. By the way, accidental shooting deaths have been on the decline along with gun crime since the 1990’s.
591 deaths by guns in 2011, 74 of those were children under 14. The next age group is 14-25 so I am discounting them, as they are also old enough to know better by a large margin.
so 74 of 591 accidental gun deaths is 12% of those… but in the same age group 725 died from accidental drownings, 1401 in car accidents… and the numbers go onward and upward.
In 2011 roughly 126,438 people of all ages died in accidents. 16,505 of those were under the age of 14. .004% of all accidental deaths for the under 14 age group died of accidental discharges of firearms. In the overall numbers of accidental deaths, that number is so minute that statistically it does not even count. I know that is little comfort to anyone who has lost their child due to an accident, but it is no reason to try and ban or otherwise restrict legal gun ownership by law abiding citizens.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf
Who the hell do you think you are??? How dare you bring facts and real numbers into an emotional hand wringing session like this!!!!!
I know, the nerve of me… I should just go and take in what is being fed to me, based purely on its emotional content. Screw the facts, it’s about the children man!!
Better a gun in the hand than a cop on the ‘phone.
When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.
Report crime; dial 911. Prevent crime; dial 357.
There are more, but that’s enough.
Prevent crime; dial 1911
There, fixed it
Obesity in America started to rise in the late 70’s and has continued on a skyward trajectory…this was also the beginnings of the modern feminist movement, which clearly impacted obesity rates since fewer bitches were making supper for their families, forcing us to eat shitty fast food. There were also less women wearing bras, which as we all know causes divorce. Don’t even get me started on spoons and cancer rates.
That’s true what you say. Also, there is a direct correlation–some say cause and effect–between unbridled floppies and homosexuality.
“You’ll put an eye out…”
What the hell did I just read?? Are the two of you drinking?
No. Should we be?
And more to the point, was that an offer to pay for it?
Dammit, Claymore, would you for pete’s sake post a spew alert!?!?!?!???
Obesity in America has more to do with the closing of drive-in movie theaters and the elimination of rotary dial phones than with fast food, never mind garbage disposals in the kitchen sink.
I thought everyone knew that.
Yeah, according to Nanny Bloomers (*OOPS*, Bloomberg), we filthy unwashed peasants need to surrender our guns and freedom while he and his fellow pampered snooty-assed elitist asswipes keep their armed bodyguards, FUCK YOU, BLOOMERS!!!
I certainly agree that one child’s death is one too many but the reality is that if someone were truly concerned about the mortality rate of children due to accidental death, the last place he would focus for maximum effectiveness would be on guns. Why dwell on 100 when thousands more children are killed accidentally by drowning, suffocating, and, of course, due to being killed by vehicles either as a passenger in one or as a pedestrian who is struck by one? You know why. It’s not about protecting children at all, not even a little bit. Instead, it’s about villainizing gun owners, with the ultimate goal of reducing our number, eliminating more of our guns from legal ownership, or both. So, Wilkerson/Wilkenson/Whatever can go do something worthwhile, like insist that school buses be retrofitted with seatbelts or airbags or something.
I agree with you that guns are not the enormous problem they’re painted as by gun-control advocates, but I think one reason why things like car accidents, drownings, poisonings, etc., are less of a focus than guns is because in each of those cases, the ‘tool’ in question that causes the death has countless everyday, benign uses.
Cars get you to work, school, friends. You ride in them every day. Baths or pools are for hygiene, health and relaxing. Poisonings come from foods or cleaning products used incorrectly, etc. In each case, these are things people are familiar with and use in their daily existence for reasons that are completely non-lethal. Cars aren’t designed to be lethal. Nor are baths, pools, foods, cleaning supplies, etc. Guns, on the other hand, are designed intentionally for lethal force, even if their primary use is sport or practice.
I really don’t think these people set out to villianize gun owners – their focus truly is on protecting children. It’s just that they’ve latched on to a simple-but-unworkable solution that is ‘perfect’ (‘no guns, no problems’), and that prevents them from working towards more realistic scenarios that might lessen gun deaths through, say, better emphasis on gun training and safety, as opposed to trying to get rid of them entirely.
Oh give me a break… they are not about anything but villainizing inanimate objects. Guns are designed to protect the owner, and to put food on the table. It is a shame that anyone is accidenatly killed by one… but here in this country we have Rights. You don’t have a right to own a car, you do not have a right to own a bathtub, you do not have a right to own a swiming pool. Ban them now, it’s for the children.
The numbers of children and people in general who have died as a result of gun accidents has been on the decline since the repeal of the AWB. Accidents and crime do not happen because of guns, they happen because someone was being stupid and irresposnsible.
75 deaths of children under 14 in 2011, out of a population of 313 million. With just as many guns in the US… Pretty sure guns are not as big a “problem” as so many want to make them out to be.
And how often do you hear of that use, versus, say, crime? Same goes for putting food on the table, even though I imagine that’s the largest use of guns outside of target practice.
The problem is two-fold – first, there is a problem with the perception of guns, fueled by fear, unfamiliarity and polarized politics. To get past that, we need to dial back the rhetoric, familiarize people with guns and responsible gun owners, and not insult others, as that leads to polarization.
The second problem is in how the data is looked at. Sure, on a per day basis, guns cause fewer deaths than cars. On a per interaction basis, especially accidental gun deaths, I imagine the stats are much, much higher for guns. Simply put, people engage with cars every day, multiple times a day. People who are getting accidentally shot engage with guns far less often, which heavily alters the statistics – in that sense, any given encounter with a gun is much more dangerous than a given encounter with a car. Consequently, the idea behind someone fighting against accidental gun death as opposed to banning a bathtub merit has merit. I just feel the way this fight is often being made (make it harder to get guns, rather than emphasizing gun safety) is misguided.
Clearly, guns are not as big a problem as many people make them out to be. But they are still dangerous tools, and arguing for better safety with dangerous tools is not inherently a bad thing.
We have stories here pretty much daily, of someone using their weapon to protect themselves or others from a felon.
You have the police Chief of Detroit imploring law abiding citizens to arm themselves for personal protection… I mean come on, I havea fire extinguisher too, but hope I never have to put out a fire with it.
“How often do you hear of that use vs. crime?”
If you hang around here enough, you would see feel good stories on a daily basis. But, as Jonn pointed out, previously, you only hear about the ones that the media wants to report. If we looked at statistics, we would find that guns are used for protection more than crime probably by a factor of 10.
The author of this article is running through the same tired arguments that have been disproven many times, but it is all they have. They go for emotion rather than facts, because the facts make them look stupid.
“Guns, on the other hand, are designed intentionally for lethal force…”
So are knives, bows, crossbows, etc.
And yet our Founding Fathers saw fit to ensure that our right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Kinda neat, huh?
Instead of having soldiers on the street corners, as France now does, in the civilized states (like Texas for instance) we have an armed populace… a militia. Come and take it.
I’m certainly not arguing against gun ownership. I just don’t think this issue is simply about people wanting to villainize gun owners, and I think the comparison with car accidents and drownings needs to be viewed in context.
LC. I read the piece as, I believe, you did too. If I’m wrong. please read it. He is fixated on the irresponsible owners of guns. Irresponsibility, I’m guessing, means that owners are not securing their weapons and ensuring children (i.e., minors) can’t get hold of them. So let’s play along. Why didn’t he write a piece about car seats? How about fences with locked gates around pools? Plastic bags? Failure to cut hotdogs small enough not to lodge in the esophagus of kids? Seatbelts on school buses? Ensuring children who walk home from school are escorted and have been shown how to safely cross streets? Oh, I nearly forgot pharmaceuticals that, for the convenience of parents, are not in child-proof containers or, worse, are left out. And, lastly, what about those household chemicals that people place under their sinks, unlocked and accessible to kids. I think that’s about enough. No, he isn’t interested in saving the lives of children. If he were, he would be writing about any or all of those things, the leading causes of accidental death for children. He can write about what he pleases but the pretense he ought to drop.
I think this is a bit like one of those optical illusions – is it an old woman or a duck? One side vociferously argues it’s a duck, and the other calls them madmen and insists it’s an old woman. I just feel it’s worthwhile to look at the other vantage point every now and then.
For example, as I posted above, the statistics, taken at face value, show far more deaths from car accidents in a given day than from gun violence. And, in many respects, you can certainly argue this guy should spend his time ranting and raving about the need for better safety measures for cars. That’s a valid point of view, certainly. However, when you shift your focus from deaths per day to, say, deaths per ‘encounter’, I’d wager the number of deaths from touching a gun is higher than the number of deaths from touching a car. People use cars every day, multiple times a day, and have constant exposure to how cars are used, and how to use them safely. Contrast that with what people who are unfamiliar with guns see in movies, media, etc., and how infrequently people who are not trained in guns come across them. An untrained person -or kid, in this case- who comes across a gun has a higher rate of fatality than that of a kid who comes across a car because of all these factors. The reason why the fatalities per day is lower is simply that fewer kids encounter guns. So, from that perspective, the author has a valid perspective that guns are dangerous.
I’ll try to get some time later tonight to further illustrate this with numbers. The general idea is a higher risk to a smaller population (kids and guns) may give fewer overall casualties than a lower risk to a larger population (kids in cars), but that doesn’t mean that the first scenario isn’t higher risk, it just means it’s less commonly encountered.
If Bloomberg was really concerned about accidental mortality of children he would look at all of the causes. Yet he is focused on guns and nothing else thus, it is not about the children, it is about the guns. In my opinion Bloomberg is trying to un-power or disenfranchise the average person because he doesn’t trust the average person with power. In other words, he doesn’t believe in democracy or our republican form of government. He sees the average person with a gun as a threat to him and his power and control. He uses the emotional attachment most people have to children in order to convince us that we are just too stupid, irresponsible, or incapable to avoid killing our children unless we get rid of those horrible guns. If we were to do that, our lives would be some much better. No, not really. Really he wants to disarm the population so he can have his way. But please tell me, why would my life be better? Would fewer children die of accidental death? Would someone else gain relative power when I gave up mine? Would my country be safer? According to the article 100 children died between December 2012 and December 2013. Is that a 12 month period or a 13 month period? Does including two December bias the result? You would of course have to examine the data to know the answer. 100 children in 320,000,000 people is 0.00003125 percent or 0.031 children per 100,000 people. Suppose the figure changed to 90 children. The new figure is 0.000028125 percent or 0.28 per 100,000. The city I live near has about 250,000 people. So, if those rates are correct for any arbitrarily selected group, we should have had 0.031 * 2.5 ~ 0.07 children die of accidental death from guns. Sure enough, I don’t think any children died of accidental gunshot in that city in the last couple years. A number that size is not statistically significant so you cannot use statistics to prove anything with it. Suppose that the number went down by 10 percent. There… Read more »
I’m thinking the same thing. Yes, we do need to support gun safety lessons. In fact, I’d make the Eddie Eagle scheme a requirement to get a high school diploma.
Either way, we need to get the hand-wringing out of the debate (indeed, out of *all* debates) and focus on the *facts* of the matter.
With all due respect to all of you, guns are designed to reliably put a projectile on target. Different ammunition is designed to have differing attributes such as power, accuracy, terminal effects, etc. but the GUN is only designed to put a round on target. Choice of target is determined by who launches it and is a different discussion.
My guns are designed to put holes of various sizes into paper placed at various distances from me. I can’t think of anything else a Walter/Hammerli SP-20 or a tuned and scoped 1911 would be good for.
I guess I’m the worst parent ever. I have guns, a swimming pool, a trampoline and an ATV. Plus I even bought my kids guns.
As long as you don’t let them have sugar, you should be considered a good parent.
And video games. Sugar and video games are of the devil!
According to the CDC more children die from accidentally ingesting poison than accidental incidents with firearms.
http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/images/CDC-ChildhoodInjury.pdf
I disagree, Jonn. I think the dude should go pound *quick*sand, rather than just plain old sand.
I guess I’m just a horrible parent because the kids both got guns for Christmas? I mean, what the hell was I thinking, teaching them about responsible gun use?
I got the okie dokie from my daughter to get my grandson his first bb gun for his upcoming birthday. Once I get him proficient with that, along with safe handling practices, then he will get to go out with me and train on my (someday his) .22 rifle.
I’m calling the social workers…
This ranks right up there on the child abuse scale with parents putting their kids in Houston Texans garb from Walmart !!!
I have to call them at least twice a day for the people that buy that crap so they know me very well !!!
OT:
I got my son his Red Ryder at 6 and he dialed it and became very proficient and handled it with extreme caution and safety.
The Ruger .22 came at 7 and the same thing happened.
It is the way to go. Allow Santa to provide and permit dad to supervise.
Yeah, that’s my plan, although my grandson will be 8, when he gets his bb gun. That’s ok, we had to get through the red tape, first, so it took an extra year.
In a related story:
Manuafacturers of die cast machines put gun makers at risk for on the job injuries.
Film at 11 pm … on WTAH network!
“The federal government has no comprehensive tally. ”
Actually, the CDC has the numbers. All you have to do is look them up.