Every year, nearly 3000 children and teens die from gunfire, and nearly 14,000 are injured.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Stop the Violence, Save the Children - Street Murals Raise Awareness

A short but informative article was released in the Sacramento Bee, entitled "Stop the Violence, Save the Children" by Michael McNielly.

With over 280 million guns in civilian hands, the terrible truth is that there is no place to hide from gun violence. Children and teens are not safe from gun violence at school, at home, or anywhere else in America. With children in the home we should properly store firearms and ammunition. A cable-style gun locking device and preventing easy accessibility from children is a safe solution.  
It is vital that we recognize the risk to children of unsupervised access to guns and understand that there are common sense steps that we must take to protect our children.
He then goes on to describe a nationwide street mural project to bring attention to the issue, continued from and effort back in 1992.

He ends with some very relevant statistics.  Below are three of them:

  • Children and teens killed by firearms are more likely to be boys (90 percent). Boys ages 15 to 19 are almost 10 times as likely as girls that age to commit suicide with a firearm. 
  • The majority of gun violence deaths among children since 1990 have been homicides, while nearly one-third have been suicides.
  • There are no federal laws that prevent child access to guns.

1 comment:

  1. "During the past decade of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR) few people are aware of the unimaginable scale of human suffering, death, and destruction that has occurred in this vast country deep in the heart of Africa. I would like to suggest a documentary ""Children of Congo : From War to Witches"" which documents the plight of thousands of street children living in Kinshasa and confirms the wide-spread accusations of child witchcraft, torture and child prostitution.

    To watch the documentary online visit:
    http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/1292/"

    ReplyDelete

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