The National Rifle Association appears to have adopted a “Guns Save Lives” slogan. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that sometimes having a gun can save your life or protect your family. It happens. But the number of times a gun saves a life is very small compared to the number of times a gun takes a life. I was trying to locate a local news story in which a 4 year old shot his grandfather, so I went to Google and typed in something like “4 year old shoots grandfather”. Here are a few of the stories I found.
A 79 year old grandfather shoots and kills a 19 year old man who was beating his granddaughter. Score one for the good guys. (Story)
A 15 year old New Mexico teenager shoots 5 people to death, including his father, 3 young siblings, and a local pastor. (Story)
A Rochester man searching for an intruder shoots his 16 year old granddaughter. (Story)
A 7 year old Philadelphia boy gets his grandfather’s gun from a safe and his 8 year old sister shoots herself while playing with it. (Story)
A 15 year old Kentucky teen shoots his 14 year old friend while handling his grandfather’s gun. (Story)
A 2 year old Tennessee toddler shoots himself while playing with his grandfather’s gun. (Story)
A Texas man shoots his 3 year old granddaughter while shooting at a stray cat. (Story)
A 12 year old Missouri boy shoots and kills his 12 year old friend while playing with his grandfather’s gun. (Story)
A 4 year old Houston toddler shoots himself in the head. (Story)
A 13 year old Pennsylvania boy kills his grandparents for insulting his mother. (Story)
These stories represent a tiny sample of the gun carnage that happens all across America every day. In Chicago, 7 year old Heaven Sutton was killed by a stray bullet as she sold candy and cold drinks in her front yard. Heaven joined more than 270 school children that were killed in Chicago in three years and more than 4,000 people age 21 and younger who have been shot in Chicago in the last four years.
On a March evening last year, two Philadelphia teenagers were machine-gunned to death while riding a stolen ATV. Their bodies were riddled with more than 30 rounds from an AK-47 plus several shots from a Glock. A few hours earlier a 43 year old man was shot twice in the neck, once in the face, and once in the head. He died at the scene. That day wasn’t unusual; it was just another day in the “City of Brotherly Love.”
I never found the local story I was looking for, but I’m sure it’s on Google somewhere. Google says there are 4,340,000 more news articles like these.
Someone created a blog dedicated to child shootings. It can be found at “kidshootings.blogspot.com”. At the top of the page is this sentence: Every year, nearly 3000 children and teens die from gunfire, and nearly 14,000 are injured.
If it’s true that “guns save lives” then why isn’t America the safest country on Earth? After all, the civilian population has 300 million guns and we’re making more every day. We have more guns per capita than any other first world country. But the hard reality is that among developed countries, no country has as many gun deaths per capita as America. And no matter how many times people say “guns save lives” or stick the slogan on their car’s bumper or print it in huge letters on the side of their SUVs, I can tell you with certainty that repeating a slogan over and over won’t make it true.
I have my own slogan: “America’s children will be safe when people love their children more than they love their guns.”
The chart below shows gun murders per 100,000 people among countries in the developed world. The red bar represents the United States. Gun death rates in Japan, South Korea, and Iceland are so low that they are effectively zero.
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