ACTUALLY GUNS DO KILL PEOPLE

Following are excerpts from two articles in the New YorkTtimes of Tuesday, February 4, 2014:

It has been a year since my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I started publishing The Gun Report, an effort to use my blog to aggregate daily gun violence in America.* Our methodology is pretty simple: We do a Google News search each weekday morning for the previous day’s shootings and then list them. Most days, we have been finding between 20 and 30 shootings; on Mondays, when we also add the weekend’s violence, the number is usually well over 100.
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First, the biggest surprise, especially early on, was how frequently either a child accidentally shot another child — using a loaded gun that happened to be lying around — or an adult accidentally shot a child while handling a loaded gun. 
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 After The Gun Report had been up and running for a while, several Second Amendment advocates complained that we rarely published items that showed how guns were used to prevent a crime. The reason was not that we were biased against crime prevention; it was that it didn’t happen very often. (When we found such examples, we put them in The Gun Report.) More to the point, there are an increasing number of gun deaths that are the result of an argument — often fueled by alcohol — among friends, neighbors and family members.
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But to read The Gun Report is to be struck anew at the reality that most of the people who die from guns would still be alive if we just had fewer of them. The guys in the movie theater would have had a fistfight instead of a shooting. The momentary flush of anger would pass. The suicidal person might have taken a pause if taking one’s life were more difficult. And on, and on. The idea that guns, on balance, save lives — which is one of the most common sentiments expressed in the pro-gun comments posted to The Gun Report — is ludicrous.

On the contrary: The clearest message The Gun Report sends is the most obvious. Guns make killing way too easy.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/opinion/nocera-the-gun-report-1-year-later.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20140204

Far less noticed but no less horrific is the unending toll from the more routine bursts of gunfire that each day send an average of 20 American children and adolescents to hospitals, many of them for long-term treatment.**

This grim statistic is found in a new study that focuses on the lasting damage suffered by young victims who survive. Of 7,391 hospitalizations of youths ages 19 and under shot in 2009, 6 percent ended in death; the rest joined the growing casualty list of gun victims, many needing lengthy and costly treatment, according to the study published in Pediatrics magazine. An estimated 3,000 additional youngsters died before reaching emergency rooms.

** http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/opinion/firearms-toll-among-the-young.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20140204