What’s the single biggest “reason” that leftists give to justify pushing their insane political policy positions? It’s “for the children.”
That’s what you always hear. We need gun control to protect the children, but anti-gunners, like leftists in general, don’t pay attention to the facts of the situation.
See, leftists say that they want gun control to prevent mass shootings and to prevent people assaulting and murdering people with a firearm, and they, then, “justify” that gun control position by talking about how many gun deaths are occurring.
What they don’t tell you is how those gun deaths break down in terms of what really happened. If they did, they’d be hard pressed to say that they want gun control to prevent mass shootings because the number of deaths in those horrible situations, thankfully, aren’t very high.
So, what is the big cause of gun-related deaths? Anti-gunners will have trouble believing this even though it’s true even in a state-wide gun control zone. Cameron Sheppard gives us the details:
Recent reports from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that more than 39,000 people died from firearm injuries in the U.S. in 2018, including 24,432 by gun suicide.
Dr. Frederick P. Rivara, author of the study, said 70 percent of firearm deaths in Washington state are due to suicide.
Sadly, of course, the folks who put together this study recommended “temporary firearm storage” as one possible “solution” even though their research says that this makes a difference in only “8 percent to 19 percent of suicides and unintentional shooting deaths among youth and adolescents.” You won’t be surprised to know that they don’t break out the numbers between suicides and “unintentional shooting deaths” to let you know how few of these are accidents.
The other two solutions that they propose involve background checks and red flag laws (again, no surprise there).
The saddest part about all of this research, though, is that, as far as we can tell from Sheppard’s article, the authors of the study don’t suggest actually dealing with the causes of suicides. Once again, as is typical among gun control advocates, they want to control the effect when the effective solution would be dealing with the cause.
And even though suicides are a much higher cause of gun deaths, even in the State of Washington, anti-gunners will continue to push gun control because of mass shootings. To protect “the children,” of course.