The data, she said, showed a surprising number of children were being injured, many of them seriously, by guns.
"We had the impression that mass shootings caused so many injuries and those normally do get a lot of national attention, but in looking at the numbers, gun violence was happening to children on a routine basis, and it was mostly happening out of the spotlight," Sauaia said. "These are not isolated tragedies."
Overall, 6,920 youths were injured and cared for by these trauma centers between 2000 and 2008, according to the research. Of those, 129 had injuries from firearms, and those injuries were extremely serious compared with the others.
There aren't many ways for someone (a child, in this case) to get shot:
Someone fails to secure a firearm and a child gets a hold of it.
Someone fails to safely handle a loaded firearm and shoots a child unintentionally.
A criminal deliberately intends to harm someone with a loaded firearm and a child gets injured.
As pointed out in the article, the solutions for reducing incidence of drunk driving are fairly straightforward:
Don't criminalize driving or drivers or the cars;
Criminalize drunk driving;
Attempt to "cure" alcoholism;
Focus on societal changes in the acceptability of drinking to drunkenness;
Focus on business changes stressing the utility of declining to serve clearly affected drinkers.
Similarly, the solutions for reducing incidence of injuries from firearms misuse are fairly straightforward:
Don't criminalize owners, carriers or mere possession or lawful use of such products;
Criminalize callous recklessness with such products when misuse of them harms others;
Criminalize failure to safely store products when not in active use, if access to them harms others;
Heavily prosecute criminals who deliberately engage in the harm of others, up to and including the death penalty or permanent erasure from society for murder and other heinous violent crimes;
Focus on heavily supporting competent training for users of such products;
Focus on gun-proofing citizens in the same manner as gun-proofing young children helps ensure they grow to be safe and competent around firearms;
Attempt to "cure" the perception that violence is a solution to one's problems.
Focus on societal changes in the acceptability of using weapons to harm others;
Cease all unconstitutional attempts to undermine and circumvent the Second Amendment's guaranteed right of citizens to both own and carry arms, as this has nothing to do with criminal misuse or negligent and reckless misuse.
The solution is simple. In answer to the incidents of children inured or killed by criminals, we need to prosecute the criminals and punish them to the highest extend allowable by law. No plea-bargaining. For the problem of injuries inflicted by other children, we need to be raising our children to have respect for life, and to have a healthy respect for the damage that a misused firearm can cause. These two approaches will have a much more substantial positive effect than any legislative approach could ever hope to achieve, and they wouldn't infringe upon the rights of law abiding citizens. Will the politicians concede these points? I'll let their actions speak for themselves.
Given the number of kids that were not suicide over the 9 year period studied it comes out to 12 per year...or 1 per month. More kids die from bicycle accidents...why aren't they talking about the great bike tragedies???
Some studies classify "youths" as people as old as 21 years old. Taking in many gang related activity shootings this way. If you look at them carefully most of them are eliminated when you just take out 16-21 year olds and specifically gang related shootings.
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