Access Of Evil: How The NRA Protects Children From Being Safe
by Tommy Christopher | 1:44 pm, May 8th, 2013
Recent events like the shooting death of two year-old Caroline Sparks demonstrate thatchildren gaining access to firearms is a problem that often has tragic results, but at least we can all agree that it is a problem, right? Well, not exactly. The defenders of gun culture scoff at the very notion that a five year-old owning a gun could be reason for concern, on the theory that the gun culture’s emphasis on safety will save them. In reality, though, that culture’s bannermen at the NRA not only fight efforts to keep kids safe (efforts that they themselves support), and obstruct other proven solutions, they also offer a gun safety program which, studies show, actually makes kids more likely to play with guns.
Not every child who gains access to a gun ends up shooting someone, even though in April, it sure seemed like it. In addition to Caroline Sparks’ shooting by her five year-old brother, there were at least 12 shootings by children as young as two years old. Even with adult supervision, children with guns can be a recipe for tragedy, but keeping kids from having access to guns without adult supervision ought to be a no-brainer.
The first step to solving any problem, of course, is admitting that there is a problem. The National Rifle Association has an odd streak of denial on that count. In press release after press release, they have said that “Everyone knows that firearms must be stored safety, particularly when housed with children,” but oppose laws that would require such safe storage on the grounds that it;s not the government’s role to mandate this. Their opposition to safe storage laws depends greatly on the truth of that statement, on the notion that such laws are unnecessary, because everyone already knows to lock their guns up, especially when there are kids around. They deployed that particular argument in opposition to safe storage laws that would have affected all gun owners, not just those with children.
Obviously, though, everyone doesn’t know that, because 40% of gun-owning households with children store their guns unlocked. A charitable person might be tempted to accuse the NRA of nothing more than willful ignorance, of ignoring the problem because it doesn’t suit their needs. I’m a charitable person, but I couldn’t imagine where 40% of gun owners with children would get the idea that they shouldn’t lock up their guns. Oh, wow, really? From the NRA? I’m shocked.
In press releases opposing bills that would have required adults with children to lock up their guns, the NRA said that such laws “would have rendered homeowners defenseless and given criminals a clear advantage in home invasions,” and that they would have the effect of “rendering firearms useless in self-defense situations.”
So, everyone knows that firearms must be stored safely, which no one should ever do because it makes them sitting murder ducks? Maybe the NRA has a different understanding of safe storage where children are concerned:
Store guns so that they are inaccessible to children and other unauthorized users. Gun shops sell a wide variety of safes, cases, and other security devices. While specific security measures may vary, a parent must, in every case, assess the exposure of the firearm and absolutely ensure that it is inaccessible to a child.
But only if you want them to be murdered in a home invasion. Got it.
Not every parent who stores their guns unlocked is a paranoid NRA member, though. The rest probably do so out of ignorance of the risks guns pose to children, and/or overconfidence in their comfort with guns, or complacency. While I’m in favor of safe storage laws that establish a beneficial norm (and which studies show are effective), enforcing them before the fact would be impractical even in a favorable political environment, and enforcing them after the fact can just seem cruel. Luckily, there’s a way to reduce children’s access to guns that is simple, free, and proven to be effective. From the American Academy of Pediatrics:
Studies have shown that storing household guns unloaded and locked reduces the risk of unintentional injury and suicide for children and adolescents.Pediatricians play a key role in injury prevention by providing anticipatory guidance to parents to help minimize the risk of injury in the child’s everyday environment. In controlled studies, individuals who received physician counseling were more likely to report the adoption of 1 or more safe gun-storage practices.
Well, this is great! You’re already going to the doctor, and it’s not like they charge extra for this. Who could possibly object to such a beneficial arrangement, with a family’s most trusted caregiver?
“We take our children to the doctor because they’re sick or need health care,” says Marion Hammer, a former National Rifle Association president who is the executive director of United Sportsmen of Florida, the NRA’s legislative affiliate for the state. “We don’t take them there for political dialogue or for pediatricians to ask us not to exercise a constitutional right.”
That’s also the NRA’s official position on a 2011 Florida law that made it illegal for doctors to discuss gun ownership with patients, except under certain narrow circumstances. That law was later blocked by a judge, but the NRA is pushing similar laws in other states, as well. While I agree that everyone should have the right to politely refuse to discuss such matters, the safety of our children demands that doctors not only be able to ask questions and offer advice on gun safety, but that they be required to.
Unfortunately, the NRA also lobbied their way into President Obama‘s Affordable Care Act, inserting a provision that restricted the collection of information about guns that convinced many doctors that they couldn’t discuss guns with their patients. The chill was so thorough that the President had to include, in his 23 executive actions on gun violence in January, a clarification that “the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.”
While die-hard gun culturists might bristle at being given advice on guns by some pencil-necked doc, even the most knowledgeable parent might learn something from their child’s pediatrician. Aside from the 40% who don’t know that they should lock up their guns, parents who do lock up their guns might be interested to learn this:
Keeping a gun locked and keeping a gun unloaded have protective effects of 73% and 70%, respectively, with regard to risk of both unintentional injury and suicide for children and teenagers. These findings were consistent for both handguns and long guns (rifles and shotguns).
I didn’t know that, and that information could be very useful to a parent who keeps guns. It wouldn’t be likely to persuade many of them to get rid of their guns, but it might make them that much more vigilant. They might also learn that, locked or not, 22% of children in gun-owning households have handled a gun without their parents’ knowledge. Parents can do what they want to with that information, but they ought to be given it.
I hate to be cynical, but the NRA’s objection to doctors even asking about gun ownership seems to be rooted in an obvious, disgraceful motive. Their concern about privacy doesn’t really wash, given the already-intimate nature of the doctor-patient relationship. Could be that, while discussing gun safety, pediatricians are also likely to offer this advice:
The best way to keep your children safe from injury or death from guns is to NEVER have a gun in the home.
- Do not purchase a gun, especially a handgun.
- Remove all guns present in the home.
- Talk to your children about the dangers of guns, and tell them to stay away from guns.
- Find out if there are guns in the homes where your children play. If so, talk to the adults in the house about the dangers of guns to their families.
People ignore their doctors all the time, but that could still put a hefty crimp in sales.
Not having a gun in the house with your children is still no guarantee of their safety, especially if they’re going to be exposed to friends whose parents don’t lock up their guns. As such, the NRA’s dual campaign, to get parents not to lock up their guns for fear of a home invasion and to prevent doctors from advising other parents from locking up their guns, is a danger to your children, even if you don’t own guns. If you’re a responsible gun owner, the NRA is risking your child’s life every time he or she goes over to a friend’s house.
But, hey, at least the NRA offers The Eddie Eagle GunSafe® Program, for when kids run into those guns that the NRA told their parents not to lock up. The organization offers the costumed mascot to schools and other institutions for a “nominal fee,” but let me save you the dough:
If you see a gun:
STOP!
Don’t Touch.
Leave the Area.
Tell an Adult.
That’s it. In the Eddie Eagle videos (one of which stars Jason Priestleyand a giant cellphone), cartoon kiddies are drilled on memorizing that routine to an interpretive dance (the Glockarena?), and the only indication of the risks posed by the guns is a single mention that they might “get hurt.”
Now, some cynical Brady Campaign crank says that Eddie Eagle is just a fig leaf to give the NRA cover for all of the other ways it undermines children’s safety, but even if that’s true, what’s the harm? Well, according to multiple studies, the Eddie Eagle program doesn’t work, and even seems to encourage some children to play with guns when they find them:
Gun avoidance programs are designed to educate children as a way of reducing firearm injury (eg, Eddie Eagle, STAR); however, several evaluation studies have demonstrated that such programs do not prevent risk behaviors, and may even increase gun handling among children. In contrast, results of a large national randomized controlled trial demonstrated that brief physician counseling directed at parents, combined with distribution of gunlocks, may be effective in promoting safer storage of guns in homes with children.A recent randomized controlled trial found that a safe storage campaign with gun safe distribution was both feasible and effective at limiting household exposure to unlocked and loaded guns.
There’s no way to completely eliminate the risks that guns pose to children, but the NRA is doing worse than nothing. Right now, there’s a loaded, unlocked gun waiting for a child to find it, in part because the NRA tells its members that locking up their guns (even with children in the house) will get them murdered, and in part because the NRA has done everything it can to prevent doctors from giving sound advice to parents. If the NRA has its way, the only thing standing between that child and death is Eddie Eagle and the Glockarena. Even if the gun culture won’t demand it, their kids deserve better, and so do everyone else’s.
Your Kids Are Already Playing With Your Guns
by Tommy Christopher | 6:05 pm, May 7th, 2013
The recent shooting death of two year-old Caroline Sparks has focused attention on the issue of children’s access to guns, but as it happens, Caroline’s accidental shooting by her 5 year-old brother is far from an isolated incident. In the month of April, there were at least nine “toddler-involved shootings,” as independent journalist Rania Khalek calls them. Gun owners may think to themselves, “Well, thank God I keep my guns locked up,” and non-gun-owners may think, “Thank God I don’t have any guns in my house,” but both groups might be surprised to learn that their overconfidence is unfounded.
In addition to Caroline Sparks’ tragic killing, Khalek documents eleven other April shootings involving children (including eight more shootings involving toddlers) in the month of April. They include:
A three year-old who shot himself in the thumb with a gun he found tucked under a bed at his father’s girlfriend’s house.
The 4 year-old who shot and killed his aunt in a room full of adults, including a sheriff’s deputy who was also a school resource officer.
The two year-old who shot his mother, Rekia Kid, in the stomach as she held her weeks-old infant.
Brandon Holt, the New Jersey 6 year-old who was shot and killed by a 4 year-old playmate, at a range of about 45 feet.
Georgia 3-year-old Qui’ontrez Moss, who shot and killed himself while visiting his uncle in South Carolina. Moss shot himself in the head with a gun belonging to the uncle, James Patrick.
Seven year-old Gavin Brummett, who accidentally shot and killed himself while shooting with his father and brother on their property in Kansas.
Nine year-old Shayla May Shonneker, who was accidentally shot in the face and killed by her mother’s boyfriend. Joseph Wolters was practicing his draw when the gun went off.
A six year-old Kansas girl who was accidentally shot by her 14 year-old cousin.
A South Carolina 2 year-old who pulled a gun out of his father’s jacked and accidentally shot himself in the chest.
The Idaho 3 year-old who shot a ten month-old in the face while both were left unattended in a car.
The four year-old son of Antonia O’Brien, who was shot in the leg by his 10 year-old sibling.
These stories each have their unique circumstances, but the one thing they all have in common is that the young shooters all gained access to guns that they shouldn’t have. Well, they have one other thing in common: we now know about them.
May is off to a quick start for child shootings, as well. Last Wednesday, 3 year-old Darrien Nez shot and killed himself, and on Saturday, 6 year-old Angela Divin was shot in the chest by her older brother. The news article about the latter shooting, submitted by a Mediaitereader, contained a disturbing statistic (emphasis mine):
According to the Children’s Defense Fund, one-third of all households with children younger than 18 have a gun, and more than 40 percent of gun-owning households with children store their guns unlocked.The fund also reported that 22 percent of children with gun-owning parents handled guns in their homes without their parents’ knowledge.
I’ve always thought it stood to reason that, for every tragedy in which a child gains access to a gun, there must also be many more instances where kids play with guns, and the parents never even know about it. I just never knew how many. That’s one in five.
The Children’s Defense Fund gets that statistic from a 2006 study conducted at an Alabama family practice clinic (emphasis mine):
Of 420 parent-child dyads, 314 agreed to participate; 201 of the 314 homes contained guns. Children younger than 10 years were as likely as older children to report knowing the storage location (73% vs 79%, respectively) and to report having handled a household gun (36% vs 36%, respectively). Thirty-nine percent of parents who reported that their children did not know the storage location of household guns and 22% of parents who reported that their children had never handled a household gun were contradicted by their children’s reports. Such discordance between parent and child reports was unrelated to whether parents stored their firearms locked away or had ever discussed firearm safety with their children.CONCLUSIONS:
Many parents who were living in homes with firearms and who reported that their children had never handled firearms in their homes were contradicted by their children’s self-reports.Parents who locked their guns away and discussed gun safety with their children were as likely to be contradicted as parents who did not take such safety measures.
It’s probably a stretch to apply that exact stat to the general gun-owning population, but until better data is available, it’s impossible to ignore this finding, which not only means your own guns might not be safe from your kids, but even non-gun-owner’s kids aren’t safe when they’re at someone else’s house (or even near it, as Brandon Holt’s story demonstrates). Even if you do everything right, or decide not to even own a gun, your kids might already have handled guns without your knowledge.
As it happens, pediatricians agree on the best way to manage the risk of firearms to children:
The best way to keep your children safe from injury or death from guns is to NEVER have a gun in the home.
- Do not purchase a gun, especially a handgun.
- Remove all guns present in the home.
- Talk to your children about the dangers of guns, and tell them to stay away from guns.
- Find out if there are guns in the homes where your children play. If so, talk to the adults in the house about the dangers of guns to their families.
This would seem to be the natural place to begin the conversation, but the current gun culture, as defined by mainstream pundits, begin and end it with 5 year-olds owning their own guns.
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