Nearly 800 children under 14 were killed in gun accidents from 1999 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly one in five injury-related deaths in children and adolescents involve firearms.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, homicides, suicides and accidents involving guns cause twice as many deaths in young people as cancer, five times as many as heart disease and 15 times as many as infections.
And that’s just young people.
So it makes no sense at all that the NRA and the rabid pro-gun lobby have violently opposed sales of the so-called “Smart gun.” The gun requires that the shooter–presumably the owner of the weapon–be wearing a wristband. Otherwise, it won’t fire.
Mind you, no one is suggesting that the Smart Gun be mandated. It would simply join the wide array of lethal weapons available to buyers in our not-so-civilized country. Yet gun shop owners who have offered them have gotten massive blowback–including death threats–from self-styled “Second Amendment” purists.
Critics argue that the need to “find a wristband, maybe in the middle of the night” would be too cumbersome in the event of a home break-in. Of course, current safety precautions–some a matter of local law–require keeping guns in a locked box, or even disassembled. Surely the time required to re-assemble a gun, or unlock a box, is equivalent to the time needed to find a wristband.
For that matter, paranoid folks can SLEEP in the damn things.
This hysteria over technology that can make their precious firearms safer is just one more bit of evidence of the mindlessness of today’s gun lobby.
If survey research is to be believed, this craziness isn’t representative of the hunters and sportsmen who make up the bulk of NRA membership. If that’s the case, it’s past time responsible gun owners took back the organization from the wacko fringe.
Giving people the ability to CHOOSE to purchase a safer gun is not a violation of even the paranoid version of the Second Amendment.
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