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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…
Other times, the same set of statistics (all from the Centers for Disease Control) is used to drive home the magnitude of the tragedy, relating it to the kinds of violence we think we understand:
Nearly three times more children and teens were injured by guns in 2010 than the number of US soldiers wounded in action that year in the war in Afghanistan; 82 children under five died from guns in 2010, compared to 55 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.
And then, there’s the shameful comparison to other countries:
US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than their peers in 25 other high-income countries combined…
The report wallops us over the head with statistics because its authors can’t reach through the pages and throttle us. The frustration is as understandable as it is evident, for as gruesome as the statistics about violence are, the recounting of what legislation has and has not passed is even more dispiriting. Over and over, the public’s willingness (even eagerness) to tighten gun laws has been outmatched by the cowardice of politicians in mysterious thrall to the National Rifle Association…
The news gets worse as we get closer to home, where state legislatures reacted to Sandy Hook primarily by widening access to firearms and weakening regulation. You read that right: more states passed pro-gun legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook than there were states that passed stricter gun control. Maryland, Connecticut and New York and New Jersey all tightened gun laws; Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kansas all somehow relaxed their gun laws – by extending the number of places one can carry a concealed weapon, by allowing guns in schools, by instituting “stand your ground” laws, or adding the right to own a firearm to the state constitution.
Great article by Ana Marie Cox. Read it and weep for a nation that has progressed steadily from ignorant to stupid.
Politicians haven’t changed. They’re as gutless as ever. The two Colorado politicians defeated in an NRA-sponsored recall this past week received little aid or fightback from their state Democrat Party. Even less from national so-called leaders of that spineless party. While citizens turned out in dismal numbers leaving the decision to the idjit vote.
The transition from ignorant to stupid seems to be a solid part of our nation’s retrograde religion.
Eideard 
“Because that is the only way the CDF can reach…blah, blah” – qualifies you for a tinfoil hat award. Except I’ve never been able to convince Eid to award those. 🙂
American pediatric medicine defines child – in general – as under 20. When the CDC was established they accepted that common medical definition. Back when the NRA was run for hunters and gun safety – not manufacturers.
Maybe I shouldn’t joke about tinfoil hats. Broadly speaking pediatricians care for children from infanthood through the end of adolescence. European medicine generally considers that period to end earlier than American medical schools.
Ohio State University considers pediatric patients to extend up to age 21. http://tinyurl.com/c2g5ah No doubt there are other variations on the theme of when adolescence is complete.
What happened to the NRA tinfoil hat dweeb?
The spam filter kicked out half of his tries at commenting. When I went to check his url – got 405 errors which often is a spammer sign – I ran his silliness through the filter again and all of it was kicked out.
Poisonally, I think he was just another rightwing nutter, maybe a bit more neurotic than most with his fixation on defining adolescence. 🙂
But, I rely on our spam filter. It does its job.