'Murphy's law' and Walmart toddler shooting

I guess this is my first post of 2015, from CNN:

The toddler was able to unzip the pocket and grab the gun -- without being noticed. He was also able to grip the gun and exert sufficient force to fire, at least three rounds...

'Murphy's law just came into play today in so many ways and there are irreversible consequences for that'...

Murphy's law, my ass!

This just goes to show, once again, that carrying guns around is inherently unsafe. Because a gun, when used as intended, hurts or kills people. 

So now this two-year-old kid is fated to grow up with all kinds of guilt and remorse that he will struggle with and probably never comes to grips with because, let's face it, HIS MOM WAS A F---ING IDIOT. (UPDATE: A nuclear scientist idiot). And apparently her relatives are idiots, too.

Call me a cynical liberal SOB, but I don't feel sorry for her. But indeed I do feel sorry for her son and her other family members who witnessed her shooting death in... Walmart of all the godforsaken places. 

What's it gonna take to shake the belief out of the right-wing gun nuts? I mean, what possible metaphysical event would have to happen to make them change their minds? Can you even imagine what would be horrible enough?

I'm sure this won't do it. It would have to be... oh... I don't know anymore. A school filled with bullet-ridden children hasn't done it... a few times. Certainly this won't.  

I try to retain my liberal optimism and faith in people, but... I just don't see what it's gonna take. These people are blinded, fully, and to their own detriment. And self-inflicted pain is not a factor. They just chalk it up to God or fate, the morons, and keep on keepin' on.

I'm at a loss for words. 

Perverse states' reaction to Sandy Hook

It's sickening to think that the real result of the Sandy Hook gun rampage -- a shooting spree that killed eight boys and twelve girls, between six and seven years of age -- was even more lax gun control laws in more states, including: Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota and Kansas.

The faces of those shot and killed in Sandy Hook. The price of liberty?

Of course, you won't hear that in the U.S. lib'rul media.  You can only see that in a British newspaper.

If you live in one of the above-mentioned states, you're living among the crazies.  Are you one of the psychos, or somebody who knows the cure?

If you're one of the gun nuts, then none of the insane statistics cited below will matter to you, because no amount of dead children can equal the price of your "freedom" to bear assault-type weapons and semi-automatic handguns with big clips and avoid a criminal background check.

Defenseless little kids shot up at school.  Just as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the rest of our Founding Fathers imagined it.  Right.

UPDATE (09.12.2013):  In reply to this post, one of my GOP friends gave me one of the gun nuts' fallback arguments: alcohol kills more people than guns, so unless the Left is serious about banning alcohol, they don't have a right to talk about regulating firearms. 

(Nor should we spend $ billions on missions to Mars while children are starving in Africa, I suppose.)

So I sighed and reminded him that guns have no positive benefits, unlike alcohol. (Two exceptions: law enforcement and hunting; but hunters can pass background checks and they don't need banana clips to kill deer).  You can't shoot yourself or others in moderation. 

Besides, we regulate alcohol purchase and consumption myriad ways, and ban it for citizens under 21. A kid can legally own a rifle but not drink. It's a crime to buy a kid a beer but buying him a handgun is fine. You can't bring beer to a public school or library but you can take a gun. You can't drive while drinking but you can drive with a gun. We have public health campaigns against alcoholism, yet doctors and public health officials must remain silent about the dangers of guns. The state can take your kids away if you're an alcoholic, but not if you keep guns lying around the house. And we impose sin tax on alcohol ... but trying imposing a tax on ammunition!  The gun nuts would explode.

Yes, besides alcohol there are a few things that kill more people every year in America than guns: automobiles, prescription drugs.... Would the gun nuts have us outlaw pharmacies before we can have a reasonable conversation about regulating firearms?

Guns and kids: the youngest casualties of America's infatuation with firearms

By Ana Marie Cox

September 10, 2013 | Guardian

The cover of the recent Children's Defense Fund report (pdf) on gun violence in the United States carries a single statistic:

The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each.

That's just a more dramatic way of stating an already staggering figure – 2,694 in 2010. Most of the report's 73 following pages are devoted to restating it. Sometimes, this done to illustrate the chilling frequency of such deaths:

• One child or teen died every 3 hours and 15 minutes

• Seven children and teens died every day, more than 20 every three days

• Fifty-one children and teens died every week

Other times, the same set of statistics (all from the Centers for Disease Control) is used to drive home the magnitude of the tragedy, relating it to the kinds of violence we think we understand:

Nearly three times more children and teens were injured by guns in 2010 than the number of US soldiers wounded in action that year in the war in Afghanistan; 82 children under five died from guns in 2010, compared to 55 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

And then, there's the shameful comparison to other countries:

US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than their peers in 25 other high-income countries combined.

Put it slightly differently:

US children and teens made up 43% of all children and teens in these 26 countries but were 93% of all children and teens killed by guns.

The report is an exercise in word problem reformatting, a hideous nightmare of a standardized test in which every answer is both "all of the above" and wrong. We have failed. The numbers in the examples change, but the fact they illustrate is big and ugly and refuses cosmetic adjustment: the United States, despite a meekly gratifying downward trend, continues to kill its young people with guns at rate more in line with war-torn nations than the prosperous, peaceful countries we presume to lead. In a different, but equally upsetting report, the World Health Organization observed (pdf):

With the notable exception of the United States, most countries with youth homicide rates above 10 per 100,000 are either developing countries or countries caught up in the turmoil of social and economic change.

The repetitiveness of the statistics reflects desperation, I think. One can picture the authors' frantic oneupmanship in coming up with ways to make the truth as vivid as possible: compare it to war! Compare it to Sandy Hook! And, of course, show us the victims – not via pictures of the violence itself, thank God, but in descriptions of who they were: post-Sandy Hook stories salt the wound:

Steven Curtis, 12, dead after accidentally shooting himself in the head with his father's gun. Caroline Sparks, 2, shot in the chest and killed by her five-year-old brother. Tayloni Mazyck, 11, caught in gang crossfire and paralyzed for life. The list goes unrelentingly on. (As of July, the New York Daily News found 120 children had been killed by gunfire since Sandy Hook; they relied only on news reports, not CDC surveys. The end number will be undoubtedly, horrifyingly larger.)

The report wallops us over the head with statistics because its authors can't reach through the pages and throttle us. The frustration is as understandable as it is evident, for as gruesome as the statistics about violence are, the recounting of what legislation has and has not passed is even more dispiriting. Over and over, the public's willingness (even eagerness) to tighten gun laws has been outmatched by the cowardice of politicians in mysterious thrall to the National Rifle Association.

The whimpering death of the Toomey-Manchin bill has been examined at length; the CDF notes further that, beyond the Senate voting against regulations, a majority of Americans were for (assault weapons ban, background checks):

Several proposals to weaken existing gun violence prevention measures received more 'Yes' votes than the background checks provision. They included a concealed-carry reciprocity proposal and a provision to prevent veterans who are mentally incapacitated from losing their right to own a gun without a court hearing.

The news gets worse as we get closer to home, where state legislatures reacted to Sandy Hook primarily by widening access to firearms andweakening regulation. You read that right: more states passed pro-gun legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook than there were states that passed stricter gun control. Maryland, Connecticut and New York and New Jersey all tightened gun laws; Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kansas all somehow relaxed their gun laws – by extending the number of places one can carry a concealed weapon, by allowing guns in schools, by instituting "stand your ground" laws, or adding the right to own a firearm to the state constitution.

Colorado reigned in some gun rights after the Aurora massacre in July 2012; today, it is at the center of an NRA-sponsored recall, to be decided this week. Another state legislature, Missouri, both liberalized conceal carry and took unprecedented step of nullifying all federal gun laws – outlawing the federal government from enforcing its gun restrictions within the state. The bill was passed and then vetoed. This week, the legislature will meet in a special session to override the veto.

The Missouri proposal goes beyond the kind of passive quasi-civil disobedience of, say, medical marijuana laws, or even those rebellious legislatures that have sought to nullify Obamacare. The Missouri law would punish federal enforcement of legally enacted statutes by setting criminal penalties for federal agents, and prohibiting state officials from co-operating with federal efforts.

This is insanity.

Conservatives and liberals alike can use the tragedy of children's deaths as evidence of the need for their favored policies. After all, gun rights advocates want more guns in schools, they argue, for the greater safety of the children. They might even deny the relevance of concealed-carry laws and stand-your-ground provisions to the issue at hand. What does banning raids from the federal government's "jackbooted thugs" (in NRA president Wayne LaPierre's famous formulation) have to do with those classrooms full of dead kids?

There is only a shuddering half-step between between the general availability of firearms, their lax regulation, and the death of children. States with background checks have 16% lower gun fatality rates.  Child access prevention laws reduce accidental shootings by as much as 23%. Australia passed a strict assault weapons ban and mandatory buy-back program (the US law once on the books had no such program) in 1996 – and hasn't had a single mass shooting since.

I'm not even sure the CDF believed this report would change that many minds: to anyone disinclined to believe that strict gun laws work, the report is just a recitation of bad things happening because of bad guys (even if a lot of those "bad guys" are other children). Perhaps the point of the report was more modest: just to let people know what is happening, what violence is going on beneath surface, as politicians and lobbyists posture. Though, who knows: Missouri has the fourth most gun deaths in the nation, the sixth most deaths by firearm for children under 18 and is a favorite transit point for gun-traffickers (in a July raid that may be deemed illegal next week, federal agents seized 267 illegal weapons) and look what's happening there.

We're beyond the point of "what will it take" when it comes to sane gun laws. The tragedies that should spur protests and marches and petitions happen quietly every day.

Give a kid crack, go to jail; give him a gun - OK!

I don't know what infuriates me more, these parents who gave their 5-year-old boy his own rifle, or his grandmother's reaction after he accidentally killed his baby sister with it:

It was God's will. It was her time to go, I guess I just know she's in heaven right now and I know she's in good hands with the Lord.

No, I think it' s because of terrible parents.  If they had given their son drugs they would be in jail now without child custody. But giving their son a deadly rifle that he kills his sister with?  That's just a terrible accident, say the police.  Time to forget and move on.

Man, our country is fffffff-ed up over guns.

5-year-old Kentucky boy fatally shoots 2-year-old sister

By Leigh Remizowski

May 2, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/01/us/kentucky-accidential-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Let's de-commercialize childhood

With their undeveloped brains, our kids do not stand a chance against commercial advertising that is seductively aimed at them by very clever adults with millions of dollars at their disposal.

The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood is a great idea whose time has come. As they say, we must de-commercialize childhood.  

As marketing to children intensifies, what can society do?

By Diane Levin and Christina Asquith

April 27, 2013 | Aljazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/2013425113926575488.html

NRA's latest lie: More silencers keep us safe

I learn something new everyday. Today I learned there is actually something called the American Silencer Association, supported by that other famous firearms association, the NRA.... Because the Founding Fathers obviously would have wanted to keep their muzzle-loaded powder-and-ball muskets quiet when fighting King George's lobster backs. 

Again, the only good use I can think of for silencers is in case of a zombie apocalypse, because we all know that zombies are attracted to gunfire.

Got flashlight? Got silencer.

Silencers: The NRA’s latest big lie

Silencers could give the next Adam Lanza even more time to kill -- but to the NRA, they protect kids' hearing

By Alexander Zaitchik

December 30, 2012 | Salon

URL: http://www.salon.com/2012/12/30/silencers_the_nras_latest_big_lie/

40% of schools cutting recess

This seems like one of those issues which "both" sides should be able to agree on: liberals because they're smart and realize kids need physical activity for their health and mental development; and conservatives because they recall that back in the good ole days, kids used to be free to spend hours a day unsupervised playing (in between praying, reciting the Pledge, and trading politically incorrect epithets).

Yet with all our focus on kids' test scores and tight education budgets, this common sense gets lost. Too bad.

Up to 40 percent of U.S. schools cutting back on recess

Researchers say that cuts in play time affect children's health and development process.

By LiveScience

August, 15 2011 | Mother Nature Network

URL: http://www.mnn.com/family/family-activities/stories/up-to-40-percent-of-us-schools-cutting-back-on-recess