In an in-depth investigation in 2013, Mother Jones found that guns kill hundreds of children per year in the United States. Many die in homicides, and many others die in accidents—mostly when children themselves pull the trigger. The kids shooting themselves or others have often been as young as two or three years old. Invariably these “tragedies” result from adults leaving unsecured firearms lying around in their homes or, in some cases, in their cars. Since our investigation, the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety has collected additional data confirming the scope of the problem. As the New York Times reported on Thursday, during one week in April four toddlers around the country killed themselves with guns, and a mother was fatally shot by her two-year-old while driving, after the child apparently picked up a weapon that slid out from under the driver’s seat. The data remains stark: “In 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of young children and teenagers, according to Everytown’s database,” the Times reported. “A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely to be 3 years old, the statistics show.”
Few, if any, reasonable people would deny that the death of a child could be considered anything but a tragedy under ANY conceivable circumstance. It takes a true hard-core Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foe © to be able to rationalize the gun-related deaths of children as “occasional mishaps”…the implied message being that the death of a child is somehow of less concern if a handgun is the proximate cause. As reprehensible as this argument is, it seems to be what Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, is relying on as his apologia and justification for soft-pedaling the gun-related deaths of children.
I suppose if you’re callous enough to be able to consider gun-related deaths- especially those of children- as abstract concepts, this is the sort of thing that doesn’t seem at all callous and inappropriate:
“It’s clearly a tragedy, but it’s not something that’s widespread,” said Larry Pratt, a spokesman and former executive director of Gun Owners of America. “To base public policy on occasional mishaps would be a grave mistake.”
If you’ve never had to bury a child whose death is handgun-related, it’s probably easy to ignore the senseless nature of such a death while giving lip service to the tragic aspect of it. That Pratt views his role as elevating Guns über Alles is hardly surprising, though it does lay bare the truly, deeply callous and heartless nature of the gun lobby. The fact that “[i]n 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of young children and teenagers” can be discounted as “not something that’s widespread” is unconscionable. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to hear from a monster with pronounced and undeniable sociopathic tendencies.
Which, when you get right down to it, is a pretty serviceable description of Larry Pratt.
