If you had any independent thinking skills you would realize those statistics are misleading, if not entirely fabricated.
In 1994, every day, 16 children age 19 and under were killed with gun...
Simple arithmetic leads to a number of 5,840 children and young adults were slain by firearms. There are several problems with this statistic. One, this is much more than the figure reported by the US DOJ and the UN WHO. Two, this figure does not distinguish accential death from deliberate homicide. Three, it does not distinguish between children and adults. Anyone over the age of 18 is legally an adult, and including them into a figure for the deaths of children is inaccurate.
If you actually were an independent thinker, you would realize you are being fed a line. If you separate 17 - 19 year olds from your figure, the number of firearm related fatalities drops more than order of magniture. Clearly, something different is going on with this other age bracket.
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If you actually were an independent thinker, you would realize you are being fed a line.
I've spent many hours researching firearms issues so far and, yes, a lot of what I've read has been propaganda. Most of it on the side of the anti-gun crowd, but (this might shock you) pro-firearms people are not completely immune from shading or distorting the truth, either.
I THOUGHT that if I reposted some statistics here it might serve as a basis for some intelligent discussion, as well as an analysis into some of the finer points of the information (specifically, the claims that firearms presence increase risk of adolescent suicide and the rather disturbing reported tendency of many, if not most, young boys who encounter a firearm by accident, to simply pull the trigger and see what happens).
Obviously, if someone posts something here which contains ANY information NOT deemed to be "100% conservatively kosher" without CLEARLY labelling it, "BARF ALERT - EVERYBODY SLAM THIS ARTICLE", then there are SOME who will be highly offended.
It must just take too much effort to actually look at some of the claims made and discuss why they are or are not valid. Oh, and it offends some who desperately fear the masses will be misled into damnation by anything NOT clearly labelled "BARF ALERT."
Fortunately, there are some here who are willing to actually think about and discuss the issues, and consider whether there be any actual truth in a claim made by anyone labelled "the opposition."
My personal feeling has been that truth is arrived at by a careful investigation of claims and counter claims made on each side of an argument, and discovering WHY claims are invalid, thus leading (would you believe it?) to a greater certainty and confidence in one's own position, but, hey, I guess such an approach is out of fashion. Not to mention dangerous, since somebody such as yourself might actually learn something new.
Or somebody such as myself, who has already invested many hours into researching the issues and who, yes, knows that certain portions of the article posted are quite invalid but who still has questions about some of the finer points.
I THOUGHT that some of the infinitely wise people here such as yourself might be able to make a contribution to share a bit of your vast store of wisdom with those in need of it, as well as sources for your conclusions. But I guess I was wrong.