Maybe we should list the tea party as terrorists. - Page 2

So, how does that stop innocent children from shooting each other and yes you can blame it on parents all you want. Without the gun there is no blame. Instead of always playing the blame game, there has to be a better way. Lets face it, people are going to slip through the cracks and there is nothing we can do but bury the dead.

I have never owned a gun and never will. I don't hunt so there is no need to own a gun. None, Zilch, Nada.

I believe the laws in place, ie, background check need to be thoroughly employed, not halfassed.
A bigger problem concerning child safety and deaths is parents leaving them 'accidentally' locked in a car, killing the child. Or a mother leaving her baby with current boyfriend, and the baby 'disappearing'. Or a crazy mother drowning all her kids in the bathtub, or driving them into a lake. Lots more kids die at the hands of parents or stepparents, many times after years of torture at the hands of those 'care takers', than by guns.
Sane people aren't abusing guns, its the insane people, who will kill no matter what method is available.
Jmo.

I have a very close friend who has been a cop for fifteen years. She adopted her cousin's three small kids, because parents were abusing the kids. Things like starving them, the three year old boy wrapped mumy style in a sheet and duct tape on his mouth and locked in a closet. He is now about nine yrs old and is threatening his twelve yr old sister with cutting her throat to watch the blood run out. The youngest boy is seven, attends public school and still wears a diaper, changes it himself when he craps in it. The kid is very socially retarded. The woman has been trying for two years to get these kids mental health care...they keep getting the run around by HHS.
The nine yr old is so damaged by his father and fathers live in girl friend, that the adoptive mother has put an alarm on his bedroom door at night...with out the alarm, the kid would be in the little boy's room, beating the crap out of him. This woman is a cop, has guns and I guarantee you that kid will never get his hands on one them.

Here are some very sad statistics;

Below is a summary of the information KidsAndCars.org has been gathering for over a decade.

• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths for 2015:  10  (as of 7/20/15) 

• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths for 2014:  32

• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths for 2013:  44

• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths for 2012:  33
• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths for 2011 : 33 
• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths for 2010:  49
• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths for 2009:  33
• Child vehicular heat stroke deaths through 2013: well over 719
• Average number of child vehicular heat stroke deaths per year since 1998: 38 (one every 9 days)
• The highest number of fatalities for a one-year time period took place in 2010: 49

Post Natio
By Mark Berman September 4, 2014

After a 9-year-old girl in Arizona accidentally shot and killed her shooting range instructor with an Uzi last week, it raised what would appear to be a fairly obvious question: How often do children in the United States — where unintentional or accidental shootings occur with some frequency — fatally shoot people by accident?

The answer: We don’t actually know for sure. At least that’s what the people and agencies tracking this topic say.

“We know how many times children die each year as a result of gun deaths,” Jon S. Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said in an interview last week. “We don’t know how many times children pull the trigger and someone dies.”

Vernick said the data is out there, but it has not been pulled together or compiled by anyone.

Agencies that compile statistics regarding shooting deaths told The Post that while they have data on many aspects of shooting deaths, this figure was unavailable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that there is no nationwide da Some details regarding gun deaths are known, collected and reported. We know how many gun deaths occur in a given year, which makes sense, because when people are shot and killed, there are death certificates and there are reports by medical examiners, and national reports can conclusively come up with a number. (There were 32,351 such deaths in 2011, according to the CDC.) We know how many gun deaths were declared accidental (591 in 2011, the CDC says). And we know that 102 people killed in these accidental gun deaths in 2011 were younger than 18, according to Vernick, with half of these children younger than age 13.

But when you try to look into how many of the people pulling the trigger in accidental gun deaths were also children, you run into a problem.


When children unintentionally shoot themselves or other people, media reports typically follow. A three-year-old boy is playing with a gun and shoots himself in the face. A four-year-old girl discovers a gun and shoots her four-year-old cousin, killing him. A three-year-old boy shoots himself in the head. A five-year-old accidentally shoots a three-year-old girl. A five-year-old boy accidentally shoots and kills himself. A four-year-old boy accidentally shoots himself. A two-year-old boy shoots and kills his 11-year-old sister. It goes on like this, story after story of unintentional shootings involving children that lead to injuries or deaths. (Many unintentional shootings of children occur when they are with people of similar ages, Vernick said, though many also involve children by themselves.)

The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which the CDC launched in 2002, does combine data from death certificates, medical examiner reports and law enforcement reports to try to produce this type of information. However, this system currently only operates in 18 states, so the numbers it offers are not national and the CDC cautions that the data should not be viewed as nationally representative. Still, it offers some information: Across the 17 states the NVDRS has data for from 2011, there were 11 unintentional firearm deaths that year in which the person pulling the trigger was age 14 or younger.

In addition to uncertainty regarding how many children accidentally shoot and kill people, the overall number of accidental gun deaths may also be incomplete. The CDC’s numbers, available through the National Center for Health Statistics, are collected from a mortality database that includes causes of death as determined by medical examiners, coroners and attending physicians. Yet this, again, is not foolproof. Medical examiners may say that a shooting death that appears to be unintentional was a homicide or say the cause cannot be determined, which is a separate category.

Vernick offered an example of what would appear to be an unintentional shooting: A teenager is playing with a gun that he thinks is empty pulls the trigger, shooting and killing another teenager. In this case, such a death could actually be deemed a homicide, since the teen intentionally pulled the trigger, even if there was no intent to actually fire a bullet.

“We know with precision the number of gun deaths,” Vernick said. “What we don’t know is all of the characteristics of those deaths that we’d like to know.”


An investigation carried out by the New York Times last year found significantly more accidental killings involving children (age 14 and younger) than had been reported in eight states. That investigation showed that medical examiners could issue wildly inconsistent rulings, even deeming accidental self-inflicted shootings to be homicides.

“I try to tell people when they look at the accidental data, particularly for children, you have to recognize it’s an underestimate,” Bob Anderson, head of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told the Times.

Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said that nine children are unintentionally shot each day in the U.S. He said that the Arizona accident, while “a terrible tragedy,” was also an outlier, because it involved an Uzi and a shooting range.

“This is not a problem that leads to thousands of deaths across our country every year,” Gross said. “The bigger problem of kids having unsafe access to guns is.”

Gun advocates said in interviews after the Uzi incident that there are benefits to teaching young children to shoot certain guns. However, some still questioned allowing such a small child handle a gun as powerful as the Uzi, which can fire hundreds of bullets at a time. “I just don’t think a kid has any business with a weapon like that,” said Nancy Lichtman, 43, who views shooting guns as a wholesome family activity. Her adult daughter and teenage son both shoot regularly.

Meanwhile, while federal law states that people younger than 18 cannot possess a handgun (albeit with exceptions including target practice), there is no federal minimum age for possessing a long gun like a shotgun or a rifle, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. And most states do not set a minimum age for possessing a long gun; 30 states do not have a minimum age for this, including Arizona, where the shooting range instructor was killed.

The fact that we don’t know the number of times a child has accidentally shot and killed someone is an odd gray area, particularly given how even the staunchest guns advocates seem to agree about the importance of storing guns away from children. The National Rifle Association says on its Web site that it is a responsibility of gun owners to store guns away from children, adding that parents with a gun must “absolutely ensure that it is inaccessible to a child.” (The NRA did not respond to a request for comment after the shooting death in Arizona.)

Joan,

This is all playing the blame game. Its the parents fault, its HHS fault, fact is without a gun these things somewhat go away. Sure people will still kill each other put look at the stats from places that have gun control. It speaks to itself.

More guns will surely help because more is always better.

Do you hunt? Beyond that there aren't many good reasons to own a gun.

What will it take to change Americas gun fetish - someone to kill 100s at once?

What about drones that fire guns? Are you good with that also?

As for HHS, that reference had nothing to do with guns, it had to do with lack of care for mentally ill kids...the system is broken. The adoptive parent ( who is a cop for fifteen years) told me she has no doubt that kid will eventually become a mass murderer. Gun or no gun.
I'm not blaming any one except the lack of mental health care in this country and the lack of proper utilization of laws that are supposed to prevent crazies from buying guns...
As for drones with guns? No, I'm not 'all for that' any more than crazies being allowed to leagally buy guns when in fact they don't qualify.

I don't hunt any more, but I used to harvest a deer once in a while before we got beef cattle and beef goats. I don't eat commercially produced meat.
I've also had to shoot three rabid raccoons since living here. I used my 12 ga shot gun at 8 in the morning to chase off a poacher shooting wild turkeys on our property, which happened to be twenty feet away from our horses in their pasture. ( I fired the gun into the ground)
I used my 30-30 to chase off a pack of stray dogs coming down the power lines on our property heading for the horses.
I used my 22 long rifle to chase off coyotes at 7 in the morning that dessimated our chicken and duck flocks.I'm sorry I wasn't able to kill them because they wiped out 73 egg laying ducks and chickens without even eating what they killed.
So, yes, out here in the sticks, guns are an asset. Animal control will not be bothered with picking up for testing potentially rabid animals, let alone prevent the rabid animals from succeeding in getting in to fight my dogs. One of the raccoons was staggering around the horses. That's why horses have to have rabies vaccines, too. I don't know anyone who doesn't own a gun in these parts. Not every one who owns a gun is irresponsible. A friend who is in her late seventies was awakened in the middle of the night by a light in her bathroom. Then she saw it was a man shining a flashlight, searching the cabinet. She turned a light on and confronted him. Turns out it was a uniformed cop, said he was 'checking on her'. She told him to get out of her house. Scared her real bad, and she told me, if shed have picked up her gun on her night stand, no doubt the cop would have killed her. The lady now has to lock her doors at night...to keep the Cops out! At least she had the presence of mind to not grab her gun. We are pretty much on our own.

The problem with mental health in this country (U.S.) is the prevalence of the "meds fix everything" mentality of the Big Pharma and insurance companies.  Many insurance companies only pay for 6-12 visits for therapy, then the client is considered cured.  The insurance companies LOVE cognitive behavioral therapy because it is manualized (manual says in session #1 you do a, b, c; if your client says this, you do that; session #2 is, you get the idea) and it addresses only the immediate symptoms, history of what caused the symptoms is not a concern and anyone with a counseling degree (i.e.. a year of mental health counseling) can do it.  The one for substance abuse is Acceptance and Commitment therapy which is CBT with mindfulness, still doesn't address the history of why the symptoms developed in the first place and can be used by mental health counselors.  From birth on, every single experience influences who you become and how you handle life.  Your relationship with your caregivers, any trauma, etc.  Medication has been empirically proven to be far less effective than many would like to believe.  Therapy that deals with relationships, history, trauma, symptoms, etc, has been shown to be much more effective than medication alone and has life long benefits.  Medication is necessary if the symptoms interfere with functioning and as the client gains more coping skills, learns to have a balanced view of past and self, can then lessen need for meds.  Therapy with a skilled clinician who isn't afraid of going into a client's past has been shown to have the benefits of teaching clients how to be their own therapist.  Clinical psychologists learn about not just symptoms like depression, anxiety, obsessions, etc, they learn about characterological issues that are caused by experiences early in childhood and have been so impactful they shape a person's character and ways of dealing with life.  Every mass shooter has been on psychotropic medication, majority prescribed by their primary care physician (who should not be allowed to prescribe psychotropics without a psychologist involved but that is for another day). The Virginia tech shooter stopped his medication abruptly as did a couple other (stopping abruptly can cause all kinds of problems including psychosis).  Also saying once a person has a mental health diagnosis they should never be allowed to own guns is ridiculous.  If a woman is diagnosed with anxiety because she lived with an abusive intimate partner who is still threatening her, or a child who was diagnosed with ADHD, or an adult with obsessive compulsive features because of early childhood trauma not be allowed to down guns is not going to stop gun violence.

Many of the current gun laws on the books are not enforced.  My ex-husband and I had a gun business and the background check is a joke in many cases.  The laws are sporadically enforced and sometimes even that is not enough.  The problem is not enough people to enforce the existing laws.  That means more than just law enforcement personnel. 

My son was raised with guns in the house as my brother and I were, my ex-husband, and my son's stepfather.  His friends were raised with guns in the home as were many of my friends.  No one accidentally shot anyone else.  Maybe because we all were taught about guns and taught to shoot at a very young age.  We were taught the value of a life whether animal or human, we were taught to respect others no matter how they treated us (doesn't mean we had to accept the treatment, just respect the other person may have major issues we know nothing about).  Having had a father whose best friends were law enforcement, my brother and I learned at a young age the "shoot/don't shoot" scenarios.  As I got older, I did combat challenge courses for marksmanship.  It is not enough to just have taken the CCW (carry concealed weapon) course, I believe gun owners should also take a shoot/don't shoot real life scenario course.  That course is as close to real life as possible and it is amazing how your perceptions of time and danger change when your heart rate is kicking well over 100 (science has proven perceptions of danger and time change with heart rates over 100, hands shake, time seems to shrink where a minute seems like a split second, adrenalin makes everything seem much more threatening, and the logic center of the brain shuts off and the primitive instinct driven brain can take over along with muscle memory).  My son got the same training.  I did to him what my father did to us, put up a big white tarp, a tomato juice can inside a watermelon with a baseball cap on and shoot it once with a .45.  The mess with the red tomato juice on a white tarp was a visual I never forgot.  We were taught to never pull a gun unless you are going to shoot to kill.  You don't wave a gun around to scare someone, you don't shoot to wound, you don't pull it for fun or to show off, or any of those other stupid reasons.  You use that gun ONLY if your life is in danger AND you are prepared to take a life (of course this will not work if the respect of life is not instilled) that way, you understand how incredibly serious the next decision is, whether you pull your gun or not. 

I usually don't go on this long, but blaming guns or thinking all individuals with mental health issues are dangerous is not going to solve the problems.  The existing laws need to be enforced, the background check needs to be done competently.  More law enforcement personnel need to be hired (along with firefighters).  The police academy needs to include de-escalation training and not just shooting tactics.  Conflict resolution is not taught so much anymore nor is situational awareness.  Being aware of your surroundings, reading body language, never assuming, noticing something out of the ordinary, all are necessary training. Civilians need to learn this as well and many don't.  Ok rant over for now .

That was a good post, mindhunt.
Let me be clear, I'm not suggesting that everyone who ever experience a mental health issue is dangerous. However, when the problem is chronic, going on for years, and the person is violent and destructive, I would think they should be excluded from owning or buying a gun.
I have been saying that the mass shooters have one thing in common; psych drug therapy.
All three of the kids my friend adopted have been on psych drugs since they were toddlers...with zero counseling. In fact one of the solutions the doctors in Charleston ( where the boy was kept within this year, for only seven days for observation) was that he has grown since he was put on the drugs years ago, and he needs a stronger dose, or change/combination of drugs. No one at the place was interested in the abuse he suffered at the hands of father and father's girl friend. The natural mother gave them up because she is hooked on meth and likes it better than kids.
As for chasing a poacher from the property, didn't wave the gun around, I shot into the ground a yelled for them to leave or the next shot would be in their direction. Defending personal property is legal. I already had one of my horses fatally shot by a poacher here a few years ago. I called the game warden when I got back to the house. When he came out to the property, I told him what I did, and he said I scared them off, that they'd probly not be back. Sometimes warning shots are what it takes to get the word out to poachers and they can tell their friends. They think some old women live here and they can do as they please. But they aren't willing to risk poaching when they realize owner's armed.

Unfortunately both the careful medical and psychological 'policing'
of those on medication for various 'mental' conditions, and the just
as cautious approach to the supply of weapons, including the
proper overseeing of licensing etc, share the main disadvantage
that they don't make profits for anyone. Therefore both services
are undersupplied in society.