Many more child shooting incidents

Since it is becoming difficult to keep up with all of the gun incidents and shootings of and by children, we will refer you to a recent post by Joe Nocera who writes a regular Gun Report in which he is keeping track of the shootings and gun incidents since the Newtown shooting last December. In this particular post, there were a lot of kid shooting incidents. Here they are from the post:

A 2-year-old girl was shot at an apartment building in Bangor, Maine, Wednesday afternoon. A neighbor believes the shooting was accidental, and that the gun went off when it hit the floor. The child’s family was home at the time.

—Bangor Daily News

Three children—ages 3, 5 and 7—were shot while sleeping in their home in Jackson, Miss., early Wednesday. Someone in a vehicle opened fire on their home just after midnight. Investigators are trying to identify the target of the shooting.

—ClarionLedger.com

An 11-year-old boy was shot in the shoulder in southwest Atlanta, Ga., Wednesday night. His brother carried him a few houses down the street to their home, where a family member called 911. Investigators believe the child was struck as two groups of people exchanged gunfire in the street. No one is in custody.

—AJC.com

A 13-year-old girl was wounded when a bullet came through her bedroom wall in St. Petersburg, Fla., Tuesday afternoon. Police said a firearm accidentally discharged when her 14-year-old cousin was trying to unload it in a bathroom. Detectives are trying to identify who provided the boy with the firearm, which has not been located.

—The Tampa Tribune

A 14-year-old boy was shot in the chest and arm in the Knoxville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pa., Tuesday evening. The victim and several of his friends were sitting on a porch when someone came out from between two homes and began shooting. Police said the victim is not cooperating.

—WPXI.com

A 16-year-old boy was shot in the chest and critically injured and a man was shot in the back in the Sixth Ward of New Orleans, La., Wednesday night. Police haven’t announced a suspect or a motive.

—WWLTV.com

A 16-year-old student at Woodrow Wilson High school in Dallas, Tex., was shot and wounded in a park near the campus Tuesday afternoon. Emilio Tovar, 19, who graduated from the school two years ago, walked into a police station and surrendered. He claimed friends on Facebook framed him.

—WFAA.com

A 16-year-old boy was shot and wounded while walking with his friends in north St. Louis, Mo., Tuesday night. Someone took out a gun and began firing at the group. The victim tried to run away but realized he had been shot in the back. An investigation is ongoing.

—KMOV.com

A teenage boy, thought to be 15 or 16, was shot at an apartment complex in Arlington, Tex., early Wednesday. Upon being shot, the victim tried to break into the front door of a nearby supermarket. He was found in the supermarket’s parking lot. No word on possible suspects.

—CBS DFW

A junior high school student shot and wounded himself in the bathroom of his school in Smithville, Tex., Wednesday morning. The school was placed on a brief lockdown.

So, if we are counting correctly, there were 12 children shot in 8 different states. Of those, one was an accident or attempted suicide. One was an accidental shooting. All of the children suffered injuries with no deaths. Thank you to Joe Nocera and his staff for compiling the data about the many shootings occurring every day in the country.

Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

17 shooting incidents involving kids just over the Labor Day week-end alone

The New York Times' Joe Nocera has been writing his Gun Report now since the Sandy Hook shooting last December. He took a breather but came back today with a list of the shootings just over the last Labor Day week-end. By our count there were 17 incidents involving the death or injury of children as young as 1 and as old as 17 years old. You can read about them in the report. Some of these were homicides and some accidental shootings.

Here is the beginning of the report just from last Friday:

A 1-year-old girl was fatally shot in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans, La., Thursday night, and her 18-year-old babysitter was shot and wounded. A 3-year-old boy was grazed in the arm and a 36-year-old man was shot in the leg on a playground in the West Farms section of the Bronx., N.Y., Friday evening. A 6-year-old girl and a man were shot after an argument on a basketball court on the East End of Richmond, Va., Thursday afternoon.

A 13-year-old boy was shot and killed as he rode his bicycle home from a party in the Montbello neighborhood of Denver, Colo., Friday night. A 15-year-old was shot at Carver High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., Friday afternoon, and an 18-year-old student was arrested. A 16-year-old boy was shot during a confrontation in Covina, Calif., Friday night. A 16-year-old boy was fatally shot when a hunting rifle discharged at a friend’s house inDrain, Ore., Thursday night.

A 17-year-old boy was shot and killed in a residential neighborhood in northStockton, Calif., Friday night. A 17-year-old boy was killed in a possibly gang-related shooting in the Avalon Park neighborhood of Chicago, Ill., Thursday afternoon. 

The shooting incidents happened in 8 different states from California to Louisiana to New York to Virginia to Oregon to Illinois to North Carolina to Colorado. Some were due to access to guns by children and teens who should not be able to get their hands on guns.

As we always say on this blog- Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Thank you to Joe Nocera and his fellow writer Jennifer Mascia for monitoring shootings and providing this information.

Children's Defense Fund releases 2013 "Protect Children Not Guns" report

Every year, the Children's Defense Fund puts together an extensive report called, "Protect Children Not Guns". The 2013 report is now out. There is a lot of good information in this report about the number of children and teens who are affected by gun deaths and injuries every year. This is a thorough report with much to study. Here are a few of the main points of the report:

Guns killed more preschoolers in one year than they did law enforcement officers in the line of duty. Ask yourself if this is really what we as Americans mean by putting our children first?

American companies manufacture enough bullets each year to fire 31 rounds into every one of our citizens. How many more mass-murders will it take to get Congress to pass sensible gun regulation?

America’s military and law enforcement agencies have four million guns. Our citizens have 310 million. Has this made our children safer?

The number of children and teens killed by guns in 2010 was nearly five times the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action that year in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shouldn’t our legislators be as concerned about the wars at home as they are about the wars overseas?

The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each. Too many children and teens are still being killed and injured by gun violence. Isn’t it time to demand more common sense ways to protect them?

— From the “We Can Do Better” Campaign, created for CDF by Fallon Worldwide

We post stories on this blog about real incidents of shootings of and by children. There are so many that we can't keep up with them. This report verifies the frequency with which children die and are injured by guns. We hope you will take the time to read it.

120 kids shot since Sandy Hook

Others are noticing what the contributors to this blog have been writing about. There seems to be an awful lot of kids shooting kids or themselves in mostly accidental shootings. An article we found in the New York Daily News documents the number of shootings since Sandy Hook last December. There is a lot here to digest. Here is just one section of the article:

In the almost seven months since Adam Lanza’s demented slaughter of 20 Sandy Hook Elementary first-graders and six adults, at least 40 more children age 12 and under have died from accidental shootings across the United States, according to data compiled by the Daily News.

Those numbers do not include children killed by adults. Add those tragedies in, and about 120 innocents ages 12 and under have been killed by guns since Newtown.

These shootings took place in 17 states from Alaska to Florida, in rural counties and big cities alike. Six accidental shootings killed kids in Ohio and another five in Texas, where about 36% of residents have a gun in the home. Nationally, about 35% of homes contain at least one gun.

“First and foremost, appreciate the fact that bringing a firearm into the home has the potential to kill somebody,” says Daniel Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

“Be aware of the true nature of youth, which includes the curiosity to play with something they find and also consider the impulsivity of suicide. Marry the risks of the behavior of kids and the danger of firearms and it should lead you to prevent kids from having access to guns.” (...) 

Gun locks could help prevent these tragedies, says one such advocate, Bill Brassard, a spokesman from the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

Since 1999, more than 36 million gun locks have been given away free through the NSSF’s Project Childsafe, Brassard said.

But a long-term solution for a long-term problem hasn’t surfaced. Gun locks are only “the first line of defense,” said Brassard, who also urges gun owners to invest in other gun storage options such as keypad or biometric lockboxes.

“The gun owner needs to know who in their household should have access to firearms and to take steps to prevent those who shouldn’t from being able to acquire that access,” Brassard said. “It’s about keeping guns out of the wrong hands.”

As we always say, every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Another blog about kid shootings

We have learned that other people are now blogging about shootings of and by kids. It's great to have company with this effort because it's very hard to keep track of all of the shootings involving children. Sad, but true. So here is a link to the Gun Crisis Reporting Project. Below are just a few of the entries:

• A 12-year-old girl was killed and three more people were wounded in Providence, RI, early this morning, according to wpri.com 

• According to the New York Post,  a nine-year-old girl -- shot Friday night in the Bronx -- was the third child struck by a stray bullet in the city during the past month 

• A 14-year-old boy was shot in the chest in Staten Island, according to silive.com 

• A child was shot while sleeping in the same bed with his mother in Kansas early Thursday, according to KSN.com 

You get the idea. There are more entries in this blog. We would also like to point out that New York Times writer and blogger Joe Nocera is writing a regular column called The Gun Report in which he is reporting gun incidents in America. Most often his report includes the deaths and injuries of children.

There is also the American Gun Victims Wall Facebook Page, the Ohh Shoot! blog, and the Today's Accidental Shootings blog.

We are thankful to these folks because it's important that we are reporting the factual information about such an important issue.

About access to guns and kids

We found this article by Sanjay Sanghoee that addresses the overall problem of kids and rifles after some recent shootings. From the article:

This week a two-year-old girl in Kentucky was accidentally shot and killed by her five-year-old brother with a Crickett, which is a 'kid's rifle.' When I saw the headlines, I thought it must have been some freak accident involving an airsoft gun, the kind which fires pellets that are not usually lethal, but I was wrong.

The Crickett, you see, is nothing like an airsoft gun but is a mini-rifle for children with a .22 caliber. Think of a pickup truck with all its trimmings but only half the size of a regular pickup truck and you get the idea behind a kid's rifle. It may be smaller but it is just as effective (or in this case, deadly).

I understand that there is a rich culture of guns in the United States and that weapons are often passed on proudly from parents to children as heirlooms. Also understandably, those parents want to teach their children how to use those guns safely and responsibly. American parents teach their children how to drive, how to court the opposite sex, even how to drink responsibly when they get older, and all of this training is crucial for a child's development.

But none of this training needs to start at the age of five, or six, or seven, or anywhere near there! 

In response to the shooting in Kentucky, Cumberland County Judge Executive John Phelps said, "It's a normal way of life, and it's not just rural Kentucky, it's rural America -- hunting and shooting and sport fishing. It starts at an early age."

It may be a way of life, but that doesn't mean it's sensible or right. I am glad that parents in rural America want to educate their children about guns so that they can grow up to be responsible gun owners, but would those same parents show their son or daughter how to drive and then let them loose on the road before they are in their mid-teens? Of course not, and that's because it's unsafe for children and it's unsafe for everyone else.

Then what exactly were the parents of a five-year-old doing buying him a .22 caliber rifle (even if it's a smaller version), and what exactly is the company who makes Cricketts, Keystone Sporting Arms, doing marketing rifles to children as if they were toys?

Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Gun industry targets younger children to sell more guns

The gun industry is trying to appeal to younger and younger children to get them interested in shooting sports. From an article:

Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children.

The industry's strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for "junior shooters" and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the websites of their makers.

The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle. At the end of an accompanying article that extolled target shooting with a Bushmaster AR-15 -- an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine directed readers to a coupon for buying one -- the author encouraged youngsters to share the article with a parent. "Who knows?" it said. "Maybe you'll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!" (...) 

Firearms manufacturers and their two primary surrogates, the National Rifle Association of America and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have long been associated with high-profile battles to fend off efforts at gun control and to widen access to firearms. The public debate over the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and elsewhere has focused largely on the availability of guns, along with mental illness and the influence of violent video games.

Little attention has been paid, though, to the industry's youth-marketing initiatives. Proponents argue that introducing children to guns can provide a safe and healthy pastime, and critics counter that it is potentially dangerous.

The NRA has for decades given grants for youth shooting programs, mostly to Boy Scout councils and 4-H groups. Newer initiatives by other organizations go further, seeking to introduce children to high-powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older programs: that firearms can teach "life skills" like responsibility, ethics and citizenship.

Still, some experts in child psychiatry say that encouraging youthful exposure to guns is asking for trouble. Dr. Jess Shatkin, the director of undergraduate studies in child and adolescent mental health at New York University, said that young people's brains "are engineered to take risks," making them ill suited for handling guns. "There are lots of ways to teach responsibility to a kid," Shatkin said. "You don't need a gun to do it."

Steve Sanetti, the president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said it was better to instruct children in the safe use of a firearm through hunting and target shooting. The shooting sports foundation, the tax-exempt trade association for the gun industry, is a driving force behind many of the newest youth initiatives. Its national headquarters is in Newtown, just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza, 20, used his mother's Bushmaster AR-15 to kill 20 children and six adults last month. Its $26 million budget is financed mostly by gun companies, associated businesses and the industry's annual trade show, said its latest tax return.

Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

For parents who own guns

This article is a plea for parents to keep guns away from their kids. From the article:

Most gun owners believe they are responsible. And they well may be, but that can’t mean much to the family of Lourdes Guzman DeJesus, the 13-year-old Homestead girl fatally shot on a school bus by 15-year-old Jordyn Alexander Howe, a boy showing off the gun his stepfather left on a closet shelf.

Nor does it negate the fact that over the past five years more than 10,000 children died by gunfire in the United States — 570 in Florida alone.

As adults, we all hold some responsibility for Lourdes’ death — for not doing more, for not demanding more, to keep our children separate from our guns.

Jordyn Howe’s mother reportedly didn’t know there was a gun in her home. But her teenage son did. He knew exactly where his stepfather kept the apparently loaded and unlocked firearm. That’s not unusual. Studies show that most kids know if and where a gun is kept in their home, even when their parents say their children have no idea. And when parents believe their kids would never dare touch their gun — that they know better — that doesn’t pan out either. Many kids admit they already have.

If a doctor had asked Jordyn if there was a gun in his home, he may have said, “Yes,” perhaps bringing about a lifesaving conversation with his mother. Jordyn’s doctor could have facilitated an important revelation to Ms. Howe, and helped her discuss preventing a potential tragedy with her husband, perhaps removal of the gun from the home — the safest option. Or, if the stepfather was determined to keep his gun at home, she could have guided him to ensure the weapon was stored locked and/or unloaded, which in a home with children substantially reduces the risk of gun death and suicide.

However, just about the time that Jordyn would have been due for his 14-year-old medical checkup, the Florida Legislature passed the nation’s first law banning doctors from asking questions about access to firearms.

There is a lot of good advice here for how and why to keep guns away from kids. Please read the whole article. Lives depend on it. And remember- every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

American Academy of Pediatrics Renews Commitment to Preventing Gun Injuries in Children

Today, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement, renewing its call for removing guns from homes with children, or at least storing them locked and unloaded in homes with children.

The statement, here quoted in full:

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is renewing its call to reduce the destructive effects of guns in the lives of children and adolescents, including counseling parents about safe gun storage as well as supporting legislation to prevent firearm injuries and deaths.

According to the AAP, the safest home for children and teens is one without guns. If there are guns in the home, scientific evidence shows the risk of injury or death is greatly reduced when they are stored unloaded and locked, with the ammunition locked in a separate place. Pediatricians routinely offer this injury-prevention counseling as part of their guidance to families at health care visits.

“Firearm injuries are often fatal – there are few second chances,” said Marion Burton, MD, FAAP, immediate past president of the AAP. “Young children are curious, and are often unable to remember or follow safety rules. Older children and teens naturally tend to be moody and impulsive. When you combine these traits with access to guns, the consequences can be tragic and permanent.”

The policy statement, “Firearm-Related Injuries Affecting the Pediatric Population,” will be published online in Pediatrics Thursday, Oct. 18 in advance of the AAP National Conference and Exhibition Oct. 20-23 in New Orleans. The policy will appear in the November 2012 print issue of Pediatrics. The statement updates a previous policy statement published in 2000.

While the rate of firearm-related deaths has declined over the past two decades, it is still one of the top three causes of death in American youth, far exceeding the rates in other high-income countries. An estimated 38 percent of American households own guns; in gun-owning households with children under age 18, many of those guns are stored loaded and/or unlocked. The presence of guns in the home increases the risk of death from suicide or homicide.

Strong scientific evidence suggests that the presence of a gun in the home of an adolescent increases the risk of suicide, even in the absence of a psychiatric diagnosis, said pediatrician Denise Dowd, MD, FAAP, one of the lead authors of the statement who will be discussing the recommendations in a session at the AAP meeting in New Orleans Oct. 20. 

“Adolescents often experience very strong emotions and have difficulty seeing past a temporary setback,” Dr. Dowd said. “Their brains have not matured fully, which makes them impulsive, and relatively more likely to attempt suicide. When those attempts are made with a gun, there is little chance for them to change their minds. The odds of suicide are particularly high if the gun is kept loaded. It is absolutely critical that families who own guns follow safe-storage practices.”

Firearm-related injuries and deaths can be prevented when guns are stored safely away from children and adolescents in a locked case. Because of the severe, permanent nature of gun injuries in children, the AAP supports the strongest-possible legislative and regulatory approaches to reduce the accessibility of guns to children and adolescents:

• Consumer product regulations regarding child access, safety and design of guns
• Child access prevention laws that enforce safe storage practices including the use of trigger locks, lock boxes, and gun safes
• Regulation of the purchase of guns, including mandatory waiting periods, closure of the gun show loophole, mental health restrictions for gun purchases, and background checks
• Restoration of the ban on the sale of assault weapons to the general public 

Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Two-thirds of U.S. adolescents experience uncontrolled anger

According to a recent study, two-thirds of American adolescents experience uncontrolled anger where they threaten violence.  From an article:

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adolescents have experienced an anger attack that involved threatening violence, destroying property or engaging in violence toward others at some point in their lives. These severe attacks of uncontrollable anger are much more common among adolescents than previously recognized, a new study led by researchers from Harvard Medical School finds.

The study, based on the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement, a national face-to-face household survey of 10,148 U.S. adolescents, found that nearly two-thirds of adolescents in the U.S. have a history of anger attacks. It also found that one in 12 young people -- close to six million adolescents -- meet criteria for a diagnosis of Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED), a syndrome characterized by persistent uncontrollable anger attacks not accounted for by other mental disorders.

The results were published July 2 in Archives of General Psychiatry.

Please keep in mind that, according to another study, one-third of homes with children also have guns in the home.  42% of those keep at least one gun unlocked.  14% keep at least one gun loaded and unlocked.  See HERE for a revealing graphic showing these and other statistics, and how gun owners underestimate the danger.

What happens whey you have a home with an unlocked gun and a child with uncontrolled anger who threatens violence?

Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Article: Gun Culture May Contribute to Suicide Rate in Rural America

From an article in The Atlantic:

Gun Culture May Contribute to Suicide Rate in Rural America

Excerpt from the article:

According to a recently published survey of Midwestern mental health clinicians, one of the challenges rural therapists face is telling parents of troubled youths to lock up their guns. The Midwestern counselors in the survey "agreed that nearly everyone owned and used guns," and said that in a lot of their clients' homes, guns were so commonplace that they became "part of the furniture." 

Parents in these areas often need to be reminded that guns are involved in half of all youth suicides, and that having them in the home makes it easier for young people to end their lives.

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Article: Children are Dying in Cities - Gun Control Is the Issue

A blog article written by Jay Lake, suggesting that the Second Amendment is outdated, particularly in regard to the safety of children, using Chicago as example.  From the article:

Sure, we all support some gun ownership. As a boy and a young man I hunted pheasants, ducks, and geese; for the last two, crouching in a chilly and cold duck blind on Wonder Lake. I kept my 12 gauge shotgun clean and well oiled, and the decoys lived in the garage.

But living now in Chicago is another matter. In one week last year, 52 people were shot, at least 8 fatally, in gang-related incidents.  A one year old girl was grazed on the ear on West Hastings Street, four men were shot in that incident. That same evening, a drive-by shooting over drug turf near South Kolin Avenue resulted in five people being hospitalized in serious to critical condition. Then, 10 minutes later, police were called to Humboldt Park, a short distance from where a Puerto Rican Day Festival was in full swing: two men were shot there, on West Division Street. Later, shortly after 9 PM, a fifteen year old girl was shot in the hand on West Evergreen Street.

We live in a much different world than the world our founding fathers knew. The old west was still new, and police were far sparser than today's law enforcers. It made sense to allow Americans to carry firearms, but it doesn't make sense today.

Some may consider the thinking of the drafters of the Constitution, and of the members of the Supreme Court, as it applies to gun ownership for a standing militia, and to oppose a potential tyrannical government. This is a compelling argument, but it may also be outdated and unrealistic.

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School shootings and violence on the minds of kids and adults

Kids and adults alike worry about school shootings and violence after several recent school shootings. This article discusses the fear that accompanies rumors of violence, social media comments and gossip and how they affect kids, parents and school administrators:

But here and across the country, real fear rising from tragedies like recent school shootings is infesting a digitally wired culture and launching gossip like shrapnel.

The pain falls heavily on real lives, and schools find they are powerless or caught off-guard.

“It’s a rampant problem and we are not doing a good job handling it,” said Larry Rosen, a professor who specializes in the psychology of technology at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

“We as a generation, and I mean everyone — teachers, parents, politicians — have to consider this a major issue that we have to tackle.” (...) 

Schools can’t monitor private Facebook pages. And even public pages like teenagers’ blogs and Twitter can pitch school officials into the gap between protecting the school’s learning environment and the teenager’s right of free speech, Lenhart said.

Once a rumor takes shape, the social media talk isn’t necessarily malicious — not when parents and students are fearing for their safety.

Just days after a Chardon, Ohio, teenager opened fire and killed three students Feb. 27, a girl at a high school an hour away in Girard, Pa., simply speculated aloud in class on whom she thought would be the type to bring a gun to their school.

That was a Friday. By Sunday, according to news reports, rumors online had turned the speculation into an actual threat that one 17-year-old student was coming to school with a gun the next day, on the one-week anniversary of the Chardon shooting.

Police went to his house that Sunday afternoon and found nothing to be concerned about.

But by then the family had been subjected to angry and hateful posts online.

This group of teens ( from article above) in the Kansas City area discussed how social media and gossip can affect real people's lives. The fears about the next school shooting can turn into a problem that schools and parents have to consider. Sometimes the rumors lead to an actual shooting.

New documentary, "Bully" focuses on the issue of bullying of children

Bullying is a factor in many kid shootings.  Bullied children sometimes get so depressed that they take their own lives.  Some have become angry and brought guns to school, often with tragic consequences.  And some bullies, too, bring guns.  We see cases of these things all the time here at Kid Shootings.

A new movie, "Bully", focuses on this issue, the consequences, and potential solutions.

HERE is an article that talks about the movie and cases that are highlighted.  You can see trailers for the documentary, as well.

From the article:

The high-profile documentary “Bully,” released in limited U.S. cities Friday, features Sioux City’s decade-long anti-bullying program and a Sioux City student who moved after being harassed repeatedly, especially on the school bus.

The Sioux City district plans to show the film at schools, incorporating a curriculum now under development, said spokeswoman Alison Benson. Other Iowa districts are weighing use of the film as a teaching tool.

The film follows the stories of five bullying victims. 

....

The trailer says 13 million kids will be bullied in the United States this year.

“The problem is real,” the narrator says. “The problem is being ignored.”

The film shows parents in various school districts pleading for their children’s safety, and officials making assurances that all is OK.

“Kids will be kids. Boys will be boys. They are just cruel at this age,” an official says. A parent describes a student getting punched, strangled and sat on. The film shows some of this.

Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Article: We need a law to keep guns away from kids

HERE is an op-ed from Heidi Yewman, a board member of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, as published in The News Tribune, advocating the passage of a Child Access Prevention law for Washington state:

Since Feb. 22, three children under the age of 10 have died or been seriously injured in Washington state because adults did not lock up their guns. If 2012 is a normal year, there will be at least five more kids shot by Dec. 31.

We see these shootings as unfortunate accidents; we think that nothing can be done.

Twenty years ago a lot of people died in unfortunate accidents as the result of drunken drivers; we thought nothing could be done. But then we did something about it. We passed laws, and drinking and driving became socially unacceptable. Now a lot fewer people die every year from drunken drivers.

We can also do something about kids dying from bullets passing through their little bodies: We can pass laws that hold adults responsible for failing to properly store their firearms. A majority of states have laws designed to prevent children from accessing firearms. In those states, unintentional firearms deaths have fallen by 23 percent among children under age 15.

Laws are designed to encourage a certain behavior for our safety. Drunken-driving laws, seat-belt laws and speed limits make us all safer. Before all these laws were enacted, people died, and we decided to do something about it. Now fewer people die because they’re drunk, speeding or not wearing seat belts.

There are roughly 280 million guns in the U.S., nine guns for every 10 people. This problem is not going away. For context, there are 245 million registered cars, trucks and motorcycles in America – all regulated – because we now know that it’s not “unfortunate” when children die because their parents are driving drunk or not wearing seat belts or driving too fast. It’s preventable.

So are gun deaths. Washington state leaders should, without delay, pass a child-access prevention law to hold parents accountable – but mostly to influence behavior, much as laws have done with drinking and driving, seat belts and speeding. Because there is something we can do about it.

Heidi Yewman of Vancouver, Wash., is the author of “Beyond the Bullet: Personal Stories of Gun Violence Aftermath” and is a board member of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Thank you, Heidi, for your passionate work to keep children safe.

Every gun in the hands of a child must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Who will protect the children from gun violence?

Marian Wright Edelman is the Director of the Childrens' Defense Fund. Every year, the organization releases information about children and gun deaths. She has written this wonderful article in light of the Trayvon Martin shooting. Here is from the article:

Where is the outrage over every single one of the thousands of children and teens killed by guns -- too many by gun slinging Americans unrestrained by common sense gun control laws. Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, also known as the “shoot first, ask questions later” law, is now under national scrutiny. But will it and others be changed to protect children rather than gun owners and sellers?

April 16 marks the fifth anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre where 32 students and faculty were killed by a gun, 25 others were injured, and many more were traumatized. Each year since then has seen gun victims -- young children, teenagers, young adults, a member of Congress, a federal judge and many more. Days, weeks, months and years go by and little or nothing -- except fleeting headlines, tears, trauma and talk -- is done to protect children instead of guns.

And then come the grim statistics:

The 5,740 children and teens killed by guns in 2008 and 2009:

Would fill more than 229 public school classrooms of 25 students each;

Was greater than the number of U.S. military personnel killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,013).

The number of preschoolers killed by guns in 2008 (88) and 2009 (85) was nearly double the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in 2008 (41) and 2009 (48).

Black children and teens accounted for 45 percent of all child and teen gun deaths in 2008 and 2009 but were only 15 percent of the total child population.

The leading cause of death among black teens ages 15 to 19 in 2008 and 2009 was gun homicide. For white teens 15 to 19 it was motor vehicle accidents followed by gun homicide (2008) and gun suicide (2009).

Of the 116,385 children and teens killed by a gun since 1979 when gun data was first collected by age, 44,038 were black -- nearly 13 times more than the number of recorded lynchings of black people of all ages in the 86 years from 1882 to 1968. But more white than black children and teens have died from gun violence which threatens all in America everywhere.

By any standards of human and moral decency, children in America are under assault, and by international standards, America remains the unchallenged world leader in children and teen gun deaths.

Analysis of the most recent data from 23 high-income countries reported that 87 percent of all firearm deaths of children under 15 were in the United States. The rate of U.S. gun homicides for teens and young adults 15 to 24 was 42.7 times higher than the overall gun homicide rate for that same age group in the other countries.

Edelman makes some much needed points about what should be done:

 We have so much work to do to build safe communities for our children. We need leaders at all levels of government who will protect children over guns. We need a relentless, powerful citizens’ voice to break the gun lobby’s veto on common sense gun policy. Our laws must control who can obtain firearms and close the gun show loophole, require consumer safety standards and childproof safety features for all guns, and strengthen child access prevention laws that ensure guns in the home are stored safely and securely. And all must take action and ask political candidates this fall what steps they will take to protect children from guns. We must remove guns from our homes where children so often find them and put themselves and others in harm’s way and combat cultural glorification of guns and violence. As a nation, we must aspire and act to become the world leader in protecting children against guns rather than leading the world in child victims of guns. Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.

Elections will be upon us soon enough. Will we hold our elected leaders and candidate accountable when it comes to protecting our children? If we don't, 8 children a day will continue to be shot to death.

Article: Guns are not made with children in mind

A short article about the lethal purpose of guns, how easily they are fired, and the danger of having them around children, in light of the recent shootings in Washington state: 
http://mynorthwest.com/11/645177/Experts-Guns-are-not-made-with-children-in-mind

From the article:  "Experts: Guns are not made with Children in mind"

"There's no such thing as a safe gun. The point of a gun is that it is dangerous," said John Clark, a firearms instructor at Wade's Eastside Gun Shop in Bellevue, Wash. "Its primary purpose is to kill people, and sometimes we lose sight of that fact."

Clark said it is up to individual gun owners, not manufacturers, to ensure that firearms are safe around children. In fact, he said most firearms do not have a safety switch, but instead are equipped with "passive controls" to ensure the gun doesn't fire unless the trigger is pressed.

Many popular pistols, however, take just five pounds of pressure to fire, making it relatively easy for a toddler to pull the trigger. 

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School shooters leave evidence of potential shooting

It turns out that most school shooters leave evidence of what they are about to do. Any threats should be taken seriously, according to this article:

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris from Littleton, Colo.; Kip Kinkel from Springfield, Ore.; Michael Carneal from Paducah, Ky.; and Evan Ramsey from Bethel, Alaska, are just a few of the dozens of school shooters who share strikingly similar characteristics with one another. Almost all are white males who attended suburban schools. They all had easy access to guns and struggled to fit in at school. Almost all displayed signs of mental disorders, such as depression; experienced conflict in their home environment; and felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.

The question to ask is, how do you identify potential school shooters from among the millions of boys who share these characteristics? The answer is surprisingly simple.

School shooters plan their crimes, and they typically leave evidence of their planning for others to see. Also, they warn others — verbally, in writing or in online postings — before they attack. They are waiting for someone to stop them. They want help to deal with the issues they are facing.

(...) Until every person who interacts with kids learns that threatening to bring a gun to school is no joke, we'll have incidents like the one in Ohio.

Parents, educators and students can and are stopping incidents of school violence. The Attleboro incident proves this.

Recent data from the government's "Indicators of School Crime and Safety Report," found that school-related violent deaths are at an all-time low since tracking such deaths in 1992. Law enforcement officials credit students like the ones who came forward in Utah and Attleboro for this decline.

There is good news and bad news here. Reporting threats and tracking students' behavior seems to be working. But we still have too many school shootings in our country taking the lives of too many children. Easy access to guns is a factor in all of the shootings.

Every gun in the hands of a child or teen must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Why do kids feel a need to access guns?

On Monday of this week T.J. Lane shot 5 kids in Charden, Ohio. Three of those teens are now dead. We wrote about the incident. As you can see, since that article was posted, several other shootings of kids have been posted. So here is an article wondering why kids feel the need to access guns at all and we are not dealing with easy access to kids. From the article:

But suicide and homicide take the question of teenagers and guns to an entirely different place. No gun safety course (probably the best advice regarding the initial quandary, and advice I personally will take for my children) is going to prevent either. Faced with that risk, commenter dc lambert wrote “the real issue should not be ‘how do I protect my children against guns” but WHY do we allow such insanely easy access to guns at all?”

I’m not entirely convinced that is the question — or if it is, it is a question whose ship has sailed. The gun Mr. Lane used was a target-shooting pistol, legally purchased at a sporting goods store. I can’t find any proposed gun-control laws that would have restricted his access to it if the facts are as we now understand them to be. What we’re left with is trying to find ways to address the fact that some teenagers, faced with what must feel like insurmountable problems, see guns as an answer.

Whatever Mr. Lane was struggling with, whatever brought the boy the Motherlode reader first wrote me about to the point of despair — something drove both of those young men to reach for a gun, and use it. We are all, as parents and as a society, looking for more ways to find children who are that troubled, and more ways to prevent whatever lies beneath their problems.

Can we work to protect our children from access to guns that they’re not ready to use wisely? We can. But the real quandary lies in how we can prevent them from feeling like they need access to the guns in the first place.

We can't ignore the fact that there are troubled kids in our midst who are crying out for help. Yes, schools, community agencies, families and friends have responsibilities towards caring for the needs of these kids. But so often the conversation does not include the access to guns in the first place. That needs to happen.

Every gun in the hands of a child or teen must first pass through the hands of an adult.

Kids and real looking toy guns

With more frequency we are reporting about incidents of kids being shot by police because of real looking pellet or BB guns or of kids carrying these guns around in public. One such incident resulted in the death of a Texas middle school student when school officials believed there was a student with a gun in the school. The gun turned out to be a pellet gun. Toy guns can look like the actual thing. They are designed that way. This article points out the obvious problems with letting kids carry real looking toy guns around.

"It's always been an issue. Their existence in and of themselves is not a problem. It's when they're utilized in an unsafe or unlawful manner," Krokoff said of the weapons, which are most often powered by forced air and fire small-diameter ammunition at velocities that can pierce the skin.

BBs are round and tend to be less accurate than pellets, which often have a shaped tip and travel faster.

"They become a dangerous weapon," the chief said, "and I don't think the public, by and large, understands how dangerous they are."

In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control reported that 13,851 people were injured by BB and pellet guns.

In New York, anyone under the age of 16 is barred from possessing air-powered weapons like pellet guns, but there is little other regulation -- and none, apparently, about how realistic they can appear.

State business law prohibits the production or sale of realistic-looking fake weapons that don't have bright colors, but that measure does not apply to possessing them, nor does it apply to pellet or BB guns, according to the Legal Community Against Violence, a California-based group that aims to prevent gun violence by advocating for tighter controls at state and local levels.

But attempts to regulate toy guns also meet with resistance. From the article:

Thomas King, president of the New York State Rifle& Pistol Association, predicted any attempt to make the weapons less realistic would be met with sharp opposition from aficionados.

"If you want to see a battle, try to see when a law is proposed that will outlaw authentic-looking pellet guns. They are not going to want to fool around with a green colored or yellow-colored pellet gun," King said.

The obvious response to this comes from law enforcement:

"I'm not trying to claim that we should outlaw pellet guns. I'm sure there are some legitimate uses for them," he said. "I just don't see the need for them in an urban environment. If you want them for target practice, that's fine. You don't need them in your waistband."

Kids should not be carrying guns of any kind around with them in public places in their waistbands. Kids learn from adults. If adults carry these "toy guns" around with them thinking there is no problem, kids will model this behavior.