If you don’t think guns are dangerous, then you have no business owning one. And for the record, I feel the same about swimming pools.
Are you fucking serious? I am a gun owner.
Guns ARE DANGEROUS. That’s why there are plenty of states that require permits to carry them, and both law enforcement AND THE NRA advocate that people take GUN SAFETY COURSES. They are MORE DANGEROUS than trampolines or pools. When ten thousand people die from trampolines each year, then you can come in here and bitch about how pediatricians didn’t warn you about them and instead wasted all their time talking about accidental poisonings and seat belt usage. I guess you’re arguing that as a society we are so fucking terrified of guns that we just run out and buy millions of them.
But no. You get your panties in a twist because a pediatrician had the audacity to ask you if you stored your guns in a safe location so your child wouldn’t have unauthorized access. Stop being such a fucking pussy and take responsibility for your gun ownership and the dangers that go along with it, and be thankful that as a society someone besides you is concerned that your kid won’t accidentally shoot himself to death.
Fucking seriously.
No. And? It is a national push to have all communities have the same minimal standards or requiring four sided fencing on all pools. For pools the best means to achieve that is felt to be through local community level interventions. But fine if that does meet your national level of concern meter.
His comment was specificically in regard to home accidental shootings, and while each of those deaths is needless and tragic, there really are not too many of them each year. Pediatric preventative care guidance on safe storage has little (not none, but little) potential impact on most of those deaths that you are referencing. Oh sure, safely stored guns are also guns less likely stolen or taken by another household member to be used for a crime, or a mass murder, or a suicide …
Getting those who do not store their weapons responsibly to do so would save lives. It is worth promoting. Making sure that parents appreciate that drowning is second only to MVAs as a cause of childhood accidental death, advocating for four sided fencing, “in touch” supervison of younger and weaker swimmers and obsessive supervision of even stronger swimmers, potentially could have a larger impact. Maybe.
What does intended use have to do with safety when we are talking about accidents?
Of course they are dangerous, they wouldn’t be much use if they weren’t.
We aren’t talking about homocides, we are talking about accidents. More children under 14 have fatal accidents in pools than with guns. More people go to the emergency room from a trampoline injury than gun injuries. All this despite the fact that there are 300 million guns and far fewer pools or trampolines. How many accidental firearm deaths do you think we have every year? Thats the number for comparison, not how many crimianls killed people with guns.
You should really read the thread before insulting people. You may not fully appreciate what is being said.
I don’t entirely discount it and I can see why state action to ban assault weapons in places like Utah would be fruitless while state action for fencing pools in Utah might make a difference but they have a national organization that throws its weight behind national issues on guns, why not pool safety? Meh, like I said, the AAP is just as much a victim of our society’s irrational fear of guns as anyone else I suppose.
I saw a summary of that report and it was counterintuitive to me. How does having a gun safe not affect the rate of gun accidents by a huge margin? Are children just natural safecrackers or do people with gun safes also tend to keep at least one gun outside the safe within reach of curious children? I don’t get it, I keep my firearms in the safe and I the rest in biometric gun safes when not in use.
Sorry if I was unclear. Most gun deaths are not home accidents. Home accidents are a small fraction of them and while safe storage is, I believe, essential and effective, its impact on the total number of gun deaths in this country would be slight. The fewer accidental deaths, a few fewer suicides more likely than not, maybe a few fewer impulse home murders, and maybe a few fewer stolen guns in the illegal market. Nonzero, not trivial, but not huge.
BTW, do you also follow the guidance that they are unloaded in the safe and that the ammunition is stored locked elsewhere?
Well, there’s this story about a 4 year old that fired a weapom a LEO was showing at a family gathering killing a woman, there’s the story of the guy who killed his 10 y/o handling a shotgun with 2 kids in the room, there’s the group that wants to give free shotguns out with no accountability, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/28/plan-to-hand-out-free-shotguns-in-tucson-stirs-debate/, and you’ve got seven pages of ‘how dare they take steps to fight ignorace.’
For the record, I’ve both recieved and dispensed a lot more pool, helmet, car seat and smoking cessation information to people that didn’t have pools or didn’t smoke, myself included than I’ve seen about gun saftey.
In the high volume setting I work in, it’s easier and more effective to give smoking and don’t drive on opiates to everyone I work with, than it is to delve into who actually needs teaching.
One thing that might make your point sorfta valid, is, IMHE, an event will happen that caused a lot of attention on a certain risk, whether it be pools, pt crib deaths, or searbelts or guns and theyr’ll be a surege of activity on that topic that soon enough returns to it’s own level, unless it’s perpetuated by partissans
No. Most of my firearms are in the safe and the safe also contains boxes of ammunition. I have a loaded gun (with grip safety and trigger safety) in a biometric safe but I no longer keep a round in the chamber.
I wasnt really pitting my pediatrician. I think shes great. I suppose I was pitting the hysterical gun phobia that has gripped this nation lately.
Exceeded only by the tyranny phobia that has run amok.
Good point, here we have another accidental kid shooting,
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-year-accidentally-shot-year-18912094
whereas exambles of the guv’mint held at bay are conspicuous by their absence.
People who have an irrational fear of our government becoming tyrannical are generally considered kooks (altghough I would say that there was a lot of talk about government tyranny during the bush administration so maybe its just partisanship).
People who have an irrational fear of guns are considered perfectly sane and rational.
Define “irrational” to you? I knew a kid who shot himself with his dad’s handgun. One week, at school, next week, gone forever. Maybe he wouldn’t have died if a doctor had asked his dumbass father how he secures his guns, but you’re furious at the concept. You’re the one who is not thinking rationally because guns are obviously more than metal tools that hurl more metal at something to kill it to you.
I have an irrational fear of spiders, a phobia. Not so bad as it used to be, but still. Its “irrational” because I don’t live in Australia where spiders grow to the size of pit bulls, and stalk humans for prey. Here in Minnesota, ice spiders are the most dangerous, but being Minnesotan, they ask permission before they attack. Usually by mid-summer, the mosquitoes have wiped them out.
So my fear of spiders is irrational, since they cannot do me any real harm.
I don’t actually fear guns, kinda like them for plinking beer cans. I wouldn’t shoot anything that might prefer that i didn’t. What I mostly fear is people who want them. Because they punch holes in people. Its what they are designed to do, just like a hammer is designed to drive nails. If I were afraid of hammers because somebody used one on their brother-in-law, that would be irrational.
If it is rational to fear violence, it is rational to fear the instruments of violence.
Ever notice those pictures of gun shows, how many of the weapons look like they are of military origin, look like Rambo’s weapon of choice? Doesn’t make them work any better, its cosmetic, isn’t it? Why do they do it? Money. “Big, scary black guns” sell better. The very fact that they look so dangerous is a selling point for the people they make them for.
That’s what scares me more than anything else. The gun makers know who their customers are, they know what to sell to them. They’ve already sold them the fear, now they want to sell them the “cure”. More fear.
Fact: guns kill kids by accident.
Fact: pools kill even more kids by sheer numbers, the effect is even more pronounced when you correct for how many pools there are versus how many guns (or even households with guns).
Fact: Pediatricians not only provide safety advice, they advise people to get rid of guns entirely and they lobby to ban assault weapons.
Fact: Peditricians do not advise people to get rid of their pools or have a similar campaign to ban pools.
Anecdote: My pedicatrician spends a disproportinate amount of time warning me of the dangers of guns and doesn’t mention pools, whicha re far more deadly.
This seems irrational to me. The entire hysteria over guns seems overblown.
And yes, guns are more than tools to me. They are the physical manifestation of a constitutional right. They are the canary in the coal mine for constitutional rights. Noone seriously tries to outlaw nazis or the KKK from marching down main street any more, not without a good reason. But people still try to ban assault weapons when there is no discernible effect from a ban of assault weapons.
Of course its rational to fear guns. But there is a point at which that fear becomes irrational. An AWB displays an irrational fear of guns.
Man, you are full of facts. I would dearly love to see your data on this. How many pools are there?
How did you figure out how many kids use community pools?
See, once again I find it simply unbelievable that there are more users of guns than there are users of pools in the US. While not as common as cars, I certainly tend to see more kids using pools (community, backyard, high school) than I do people with guns.
But, if you’ve got the data, I’ll be thrilled to be educated.
By accident, or on purpose? Because as we have seen, kids die from intentional gun violence, something I doubt can be said about pools.
If I can find a single pediatrician who does not do this, then your claim is false. Such generalizations add nothing to the fight against ignorance.
Is it your contention that pediatricians go down a list of most dangerous to least dangerous dangers to children mathematically, and when they don’t it’s because of their politics? I tend to think that pediatricians are human beings instead of robots. Also your whining about it makes you sound like a complete and utter wimp to anyone outside of your bubble, btw. Woe is you, someone asked if your children are at a home with safely stored guns. Again, the kid I knew might be alive today if a pediatrician had bothered to ask the dummy where he kept his gun, but your emotions about guns make you perceive a sleight when a doctor is just worrying about safety. But they better not do that because dead kids is less important than your delicate gun owning sensibilities (guns over kids, typical gun owner attitude btw)
If the doctor had asked you about rabies would you have gotten your panties in such a twist? More kids die annually from guns than rabies after all. Since that is FACT as you like to say, it proves some sort of political agenda, or something. :rolleyes:
I don’t have an irrational fear of guns. I own a gun and all things being equal would like to own some more. But as the NRA says, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and I’m afraid of people with guns that aren’t adequately secured.
If 20 kids had died in a pool accident that neither they, nor there parents had chosen for them to be exposed to, you’d be seeing a lot of discourse about pools right now. I don’t know where you’ve been, but I’ve seen lots of pool safety campaigns.
It bears repeating, dead kids suck, I mean really, really suck. I recently did chest compressions on a 9 week old that probably died because her grandmother still hadn’t got the 411 on safe sleeping habits the AAP has been promoting for well over a decade.
It’s taking longer than we thought, so if you’re ahead of the curve, good for you, but too many aren’t to make your hurt feelings the priority.
Amusingly in the Hospital I was passing through today, there was a giant poster warning us of one of the greatest threats to children: “Accidental Drownings in Pools!” I saw that and thought of this thread.
I should have taken a picture of it for ya. Don’t hate on the fact that your Pediatrician hasn’t warned you about a pool yet, just tell her you own a pool at your next visit and see if she takes up 2 mins of your time to tell you your pool could be dangerous. Then you’ll have a point.
Also, the pediatricians are against trampolines, and are supposed to “actively discourage” their use.
Sounds like those damn Commie pediatricians are doing exactly what they say they’re doing - looking out for risks to children. How dare they.
We are talking about accidents here. We are also generally talking about very young children rather than teenagers.
In this case, its because of their irrational fear of guns. Its not that I am put out by them mentioning it but there is a hysteria rippling through society that overestimates the danger of guns.
Just havging a pool in thye home exposes your child to pool accidents. Or are you trying to equate accidental shooting in the home (which is what pediatricians seem to be worried about when they advise the parents of a toddler to get rid of their guns) with Sandy Hook?
I agree that Sandy hook colors all discussions and thoughts about guns right now and it does so in an irrational way. Nothing that is being proposed would have prevented Newtown. That doesn’t mean that Newtown shouldn’t be an opportunity for us to reflect on gun violence in the country generally (and an AWB doesn’t really move the needle on gun violence) but I don’t really see what sandy hook has to do with pediatric advice to get rid of your guns.
Why does it bear repeating? Has anyone disagreed or seemed confused on this point? Can we try not to frame this as me being on the side of more dead kids and you being on the side of less dead kids? Its insulting and doesn’t really do much for your argument.
I don’t hate my pedicatrician. I think shes great otherwise I wouldn’t use her, there is a reasoanbly high density of pediatricians in Northern Virginia to choose from. I’m not upset that my pediatrician hasn’t warned me about pools. I am pointing out the extraordinary focus that society (including my pediatrician) have put on the dangers of firearms to the point of not only encouraging me to use safe gun storage practices but ti get rid of my firearms (for the sake of the child). We don’t encourage parents to get rid of their pools and yet they are far more deadly than firearms.
My pediatrician discourages too much TV and fast food too. I don’t see where they are trying to get trampolines banned at the federal level. Why the special effort for guns?