Toddlers in the United States Shoot people at a rate of about one person per week.
Cite
This is a solvable problem. We’ve figured out how to keep them away from the bleach and the Percocet.
We can do this.
I’m unclear as to what you’re proposing to debate here.
Clearly, pre-schools are failing to teach firearm safety. We need NRA outreach here.
You could probably get an increase in those numbers if guns were distributed in greater numbers to single parent homes (less parental oversight).
You bettcha, and the NRA line is "The best way to stop a bad toddler with a gun is a good toddler with a gun.
My God! There’s a toddler in the room with my wife and baby right now!!
This is why it is hard to take gun control advocates seriously.
Nobody but the most demented would disagree that toddlers getting access to firearms and having accidents is a Very Bad Thing.
But you can’t just leave it at that, can you? You have to come up with wild, emotional, click-baity exaggerations:
Oh my dear heavens! Why can’t we keep the toddlers away from guns when we can obviously keep them away from poisons! I’m so emotionally fired up to go after them evil guns!
But no, the insinuation you tried to make is very much wrong. 51 shootings per year is 1 out of every 233,660 toddlers, when 1 out of every 606 toddlers per year is a victim of a poison exposure. (Poison Stats, Population Stats)
You could just stick with the horror of toddlers getting access to firearms and everyone would be behind you. But you have to try to create the impression that it is bigger problem than toddlers getting access to poisons, when in fact poisoning is 385 times more likely - much, much higher than you’d expect if we were “better at”, or at least “just as good at” keeping poisons away from children than at keeping firearms away from children, considering that there are firearms in 1/3 of homes. A reasonable person starts wondering why you’re trying so hard to mislead them, and you lose all credibility and support for a cause that damn near nobody wouldn’t get behind.
To hell with facts! We want wild, emotional lies to demonize the opponents! How much money have the top gun control groups spent on firearm safety education for children?
There already is a shutterstock photo you could use for your cause.
It really stand to reason that this happens. If you have any experience at all with toddlers you’ll realize that every one of them is a sociopath.
We have solutions. They’re called gun safes and trigger locks. People being too lazy to use them isn’t really a gun control problem.
Well, it is if you have no system to enforce their use - other than death or injury, that is.
Not at all surprising. You’ve only got to look at a playground to realize toddlers are sociopaths.
The police can’t enter your home without a warrant or permission. I’m not sure how they would enforce it. Also, there aren’t enough police working hours to do their jobs right now.
A toddler has never wailed because his sister was hungry.
On this very board we have any number of posters who argued vehemently that it was unethical and intrusive for a physician to even be legally allowed to ask new parents if they had guns in the house, and if so, what arrangements had they made to keep them away from toddlers.
If I remember correctly, the courts decided it wasn’t actually okay to make it illegal for doctors to ask that question, but we still have a wide spread social attitude that guns in the house aren’t a safety issue. There’s a lot of room to do things before we get to door to door safety checks.
Your own cite says:
And
I assume there there are any number of “gun exposures” that aren’t reported–this is 51 times someone actually got shot. Not all of those 51 shootings were fatal. However, I’d assume they all had at least a “moderate” effect.
Furthermore, your source has a chart of “poisoning fatalities in children younger than 6 years reported to US Poison Control from 2011 through 2015.” It shows 195 kids over 5 years. It includes intentional poisonings, but they typically represent less that 1% of exposures.
I am really not seeing “poison” and “guns” as a terrible basis of comparison. Poisons are much, much more common in households and mechanically easier to use than a gun, but they pose only a slightly greater risk than guns. That suggests the work we do to educate people about poison safety has a tremendous effect.
Also, looking at that chart, the second leading cause of poisoning, gasses/fumes/vapors, doesn’t really fit the bill: kids don’t stumble on the carbon monoxide you left out. That makes is more like 150 deaths over 4 years–fewer than one a week.
Furthermore, while the chart talks about kids under 6, the shooting stats focus on kids between 1-3. I can’t believe that the number of kids aged 3-6 who shoot people is non-zero: if anything, I’d expect it to be a little higher, just because 4 year olds are a lot smarter about devices and a lot more likely to be left relatively unsupervised. Of course, we don’t know, because we don’t aggregate shooting stats because Freedom.
Here we have a perfectly logical and acceptable law that requires households with children to store the guns in gun safes or use trigger locks … oh, but that’s not good enough, how do we enforce this law? … that’s the problem with any law, people who don’t respect the law are going to willfully violate that law … just look at all the alligators chained to fire hydrants in Michigan …
Gun control laws are only going to work among folks who respect the laws …
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@ PatrickLondon - You should learn more about the basic gun-nut … they know that just one criminal conviction could make them lose their right to own a gun … to them, this is a fate worse than death … if you’d just try to get to know a few, I think you’ll find they’re more respectful of the laws than the average person …
It’s against the law to bring a gun onto public school property … that sure hasn’t worked out very well now has it? …
@ madsircool - Child Welfare has fairly broad powers to enforce all kinds of child safety laws … although we can make them go get a warrant, just that when they return they will be taking our children away from us … remember, the 4th Amendment applies to property and the 13th Amendment applies to children … parents do not own their children …
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Haha … I included language in my rental advertising to the effect all units were gun-safe ready … not that I cared about the guns or children … I just wanted the general public to believe my apartment complex was full of guns and gun-nuts … we were unaffected by the surge of crime in our community, gang-bangers kept their distance !!! …
This is a cute story, but an apartment full of gun nuts
Leads to additional issues even if there are no guns.
I’ve heard plenty of gun nuts make the argument that if you keep a trigger lock on the gun, or keep it in a safe, then it’s not “at the ready” to be used as intended.
Funny how every cop I know with kids keeps his gun in a locked box at night.