In December, a 13-year-old Ascension Parish boy was shot in the head, and his 14-year-old friend was arrested for killing him by accident when playing with a stolen .38 after smoking marijuana.
Within the month, three other similar shootings shook Baton Rouge — an alarming enough trend to prompt the district attorney and coroner there to issue a public health alert.
In New Orleans in June, 5-year-old Brandajah Smith's mother locked her alone in the house. Police say the kindergartner found a .38-caliber revolver stashed under a pillow, put it to her forehead and pulled the trigger.
The grim stories are not anomalies. The rate at which children are inadvertently shot to death in Louisiana is three times the American average. Between 2007 and 2011, at least 89 kids in Louisiana were killed in what is classified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the accidental discharge of weapons.
"Often times these shootings are referred to as accidental shootings. This is not correct. These are not accidents," Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar C. Moore III and Coroner William "Beau" Clark wrote in their joint statement. "They are foreseeable injuries and deaths that can occur whenever the adult owners of these firearms leave them unsecured where children and young adults can access them."
The article goes on to explain how the laws in Louisiana are so slanted towards extreme gun rights that advocates easily "killed legislative efforts to legally mandate that its citizens keep guns away from kids. During the past Legislative session, a bill requiring guns to be stored in a safe or equipped with trigger locks died without fanfare."
This is what gun rights are all about. Freedom.
Another interesting perspective comes accross in this story. Louisiana has three times the national average of child gun deaths. But when the biased gun nuts quote the insignificantly small numbers of deaths they include places like New Jersey where there are many times fewer incidents.
They should restrict their comments to places like Louisiana where they enjoy the kind of freedom they want with all its resultant misery.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
The problem here is that New Jersey isn't the only state in which not many children die from accidental gunfire. You have to take many other states with excellent gun laws into account, not just the slave states.
ReplyDelete"This is what gun rights are all about."
ReplyDeleteNo, this is about irresponsible people. You want to make it about guns and our freedoms.
There are 20 other states within two Brady points of Louisiana in their gun law ratings. Why don't they have Louisiana's problems?
ReplyDeleteThey probably do. Or are you offering evidence that they're children are dying less frequently?
DeleteYes, I have evidence. How about the title of this post? Louisiana has three times the rate of the rest of the country. Most states have laws closer to Louisiana than to California. Remember, the median value of Brady score in the country is 7/100. Seven. Your claim is mathematically impossible.
DeleteWhat claim?
DeleteYour claim that states with Louisiana's gun laws will probably have Louisiana's child gun death rate.
DeleteMikeb, you argued that the low number of deaths in this country due to accidental gunfire is because of states like New Jersey. The problem with that is the fact that most states have gun laws like Louisiana's, so the handful of slave states cannot account for the low number of deaths.
DeleteGunloons are irresponsible.
ReplyDeleteI'm still waiting for a definition of "gunloon" that makes any sense.
Delete