Gun deaths involving children are devastating. The NRA has no idea what to say about them.
As the National Rifle Association’s annual conference hits Nashville this weekend with 70,000 expected attendees, the organization has good reason to be upbeat. For another year, it has succeeded in stalling legislative attempts at moderate gun controls, rolling back existing state regulations and winning media battles. But there’s a looming question that should be seriously concerning the NRA and its supporters: how to reconcile the organization’s agenda with new evidence on the prevalence of gun accidents involving children.
Over the past year, new studies and media reports have documented America’s extraordinary number of child-involved shootings. These occur when a child happens upon a gun, or is left alone with one, and ends up shooting themselves or another person. Such disasters result in hundreds of child fatalities and have made American children nine times more likely to die in gun accidents than children anywhere else in the developed world. These deaths pose a massive challenge for the NRA. They demonstrate fairly conclusively that guns cannot be both safe and ubiquitous; the inevitable consequence of widespread gun ownership is a never-ending series of tragedies involving children. But, desperate to insist there’s nothing wrong, the NRA has proved itself totally incapable of responding to the problem.
The stories are endless and gruesome. A toddler shoots an infant while they are left alone in a car. A five-year-old boy shoots a three-year-old girl. And so on, ad infinitum. In Texas last month, the sheriff of Houston pleaded despairingly with the public after three children were shot dead in four days. And in widely reported Idaho incident, a two-year-old shot his mother to death in a Walmart after finding a gun in her handbag.
These cases change the terms of the gun control debate. Ordinarily whenever America’s extraordinary level of gun violence is brought up, usually after a mass killing of newly shocking savagery, the NRA offers its well-honed reply: For every bad guy with a gun, there should be a good guy with a gun. It’s the people, not the guns. These slogans, with their emphasis on personal responsibility, have been tremendously effective. But the child-involved shootings are much harder to explain away, since they don’t allow for such facile moral narratives. Talk of good guys and bad guys loses all meaning when a toddler has shot his baby brother.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/09/deaths-of-children-are-the-most-devastating-effect-of-our-gun-culture-the-nra-has-no-idea-what-to-say-about-them/
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