

The Times’ popular ban-or-nothing approach isn’t just a proven failure. They exhort you to change your behaviour. The grieving parents MADD puts in their commercials don’t badger you not to drink, after all. But among those grieving them, I suspect there is a lot of potential advice to be imparted besides “ban guns now”- don’t keep it loaded always lock the safe if your kid seems unstable, don’t brush it off.

Find Full Comment on Facebook įew of these victims will make the news. It’s a gun rights issue, sure but it’s also a public health emergency. Some states’ children suffer from a rate of accidental gun-related death comparable to Canadian children’s total risk of accidental death. Another 505 Americans died by “accidental discharge of firearms,” 69 of them under 15 and three not having reached their first birthday. And in 2013, 21,175 Americans committed suicide with a firearm. Murders tend to be more explicable, at least, than suicides. The Times proposed no gun control measure except banning certain kinds of guns and ammunition outright.Īs alarming as America’s gun homicide figures are, though -11,208 in 2013, according to CDC data - the number of non-homicide gun deaths has always struck me as far more hideous. And still, inexplicably, they soldier on with the same message. With 20 dead six- and seven-year-olds awaiting their funerals in Connecticut, the gun control movement was sure it finally had its moment. Mass shooting occurs demands for gun control proliferate polling shows most Americans desire precisely the opposite.


Indeed, it has become like stock theatre. Over two decades of well-moneyed advocacy, encompassing Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Aurora and so many other mass killings involving semi-automatic firearms, support for a ban on “assault weapons” dropped from 80 per cent to 45 per cent opposition grew from 18 per cent to 53 per cent. An ABC/ Washington Post poll released Wednesday illustrates - not for the first time - the gun control movement’s comprehensive failure to sell its message to Americans. Article contentīut it’s a tricky business declaring something a moral outrage and a national disgrace when the majority of the nation likes it just fine. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
