Kids and Guns

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Kids and Guns

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Dating back
to the mid 60’s with the killing of 14 and the injuring of 31 others at
the University of Texas at Austin there have been 29 other incidents of
school shootings in America with the most recent being the shooting at SuccessTech Academy in Cleveland, Ohio.
Besides being horrendous incidents of senseless murder they have
sparked a huge debate about how readily available guns should be for
children. The implication here is that tougher laws regarding the
acquisition of guns and the ability for children to posses guns would
have prevented a number of these incidents, if not all of them.

But first, who are these murderous kids? The Safe School Initiative Final Report,
that was published in 2002 by the US Secret Service and US Department
of Education, attempts to answer this question by focusing on those
attacks that were premeditated attacks on specific targets. They found
that there really was no defining group who where all or even most of
the killers will come from. Many had good grades and came from intact
families (pages 22 to 27 if you want to read more) but there really
wasn’t a definable group from where they all came.

Even though there isn’t a definable group from where these kids came
most of them used guns. But these kids weren’t the only ones with guns
at schools. Shockingly, according to the Youth Violence Project,
there were over 2,500 kids caught caring guns on campus during the
2001-2002 and 2002-2003 school years during each of those years.
Remember, these numbers only include those who were caught carrying a
firearm. So it is also true that just because a student has a gun on
campus doesn’t mean there’s going to be a school shooting. Evidently,
guns don’t lead to a Wild West atmosphere in our nation’s schoolyards.

Looking closer I looked through each of the thirty shootings on
campuses that I mentioned earlier. Out of this sample 17 of the attacks
were committed by persons under the age of 18. The first of these
incidents happened in 1979 and the last one being earlier this week.
All of them are bad but it needs to be noted that this doesn’t even
constitute one attack every two years. Furthermore, after reading
through these incidents I found that most of these kids didn’t even use
their own guns. They usually just took a gun that was left unattended
in their homes. It would seem that the problem with all of these kids
is that the parents needed to take more responsibility over the raising
of their children and the stewardship of their weapons.

Instead of being alarmed at the recent “spate” of school shootings
we should be focusing on the decrease in the rate of violence in our
schools. According to the Youth Violence Project again we find that the
serious violent crime rate per one-thousand students has dropped
perceptibly in recent years.

Additionally, the number of murders on school campuses has dropped as well during the last decade plus.

Even with thousands of kids bringing guns and, doubtlessly, other
weapons to school the number of homicides has dropped from 42 in the
early 90s to 13 in 2005.

These numbers don’t just hold for schools, they hold for the nation overall. The Bureau of Justice Statistics offers a plethora of charts that follows the rate of crimes committed by guns.
In my opinion the most important chart follows the trends of crimes
(these crimes include murders, robberies, and aggravated assaults)
committed with firearms from 1973 to 2005. What this chart shows is
that the number of crimes committed with the aide of a firearm hasn’t
really changed that much save for the period during the late 1980s when
there was a spike in this type of crime.

Some of the most encouraging statistics that comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics is that the number of unintentional deaths caused by firearms has been steadily decreasing since 1991.
Perhaps this is due to an increased awareness about the giant
responsibility that is involved with owning a gun or, as I’m sure a lot
of people will contend, it is thanks to laws that limit the sale of
firearms and which firearms can be bought.

To find the other side to this story I went over to the Brady
website. One of the services that they do a grading of each state based
on a set of criteria decided upon by them. (Click
on this link to find all the information that I analyze here, it takes
some extra clicking on your own but I believe in you.) The Brady
site has grades going from 1997 to 2005 with more specific grading
starting in 2001. I found the grades for the states where a kid
committed a firearm crime at schools and the findings were not real
good at first. There were two incidents in both 1998 and 1999 at
schools. None of the states where these crimes took place realized a
grade over a C- with one D+ and two D’s. But then I looked at every
other state during these years and found that for both years only 11
states got a grade of a B- or better for both years. So, there was a
much higher statistical chance that a shooting would come from a state
with a lower grade just because there were more of those states.

Then I looked into the four kid started school shootings from 2001
to 2005. These grades gave more information as well so as to allow us a
better understanding of what the grades actually meant. Here are there
definitions for the applicable grades (i.e. those pertaining to guns
and kids):

• Juvenile Possession of Guns – Is it illegal for a child to possess a gun without supervision?

• Sale/Transfer of Guns to Juveniles – Is it illegal to sell a gun to a child?

• Safe Storage and Gun Owner Accountability – Are gun owners held responsible for leaving loaded

guns easily accessible to children?

• Childproof Guns and Gun Design Safety – Are guns required to have child-safety locks, loaded chamber

indicators and other childproof designs? Are there restrictions on unsafe Saturday night

specials?

The shooting that occurred in California in 2001
happened in a state that got an overall grade of an A-, a B for
Juvenile Possession Laws, an A for Juvenile Sale/Transfer Laws, an A
for Child Access Prevention Law, and a B+ for gun safety. The other
incidents aren’t as extreme but they didn’t receive uniformly horrible
marks either. The other states where these incidents happened received
overall grades of two C-’s and a D+. They all got B’s for Juvenile
Possession Laws, two B+’s and an A- for Juvenile Sale/Transfer Laws,
two C’s and an F for Child Access Prevention Law, and two C+ and an F
for gun safety. Even in states that got high marks for their Juvenile
Possession Laws and Juvenile Sale/Transfer Laws school shootings still
occurred.

The last thing that needs to be talked about on this subject is
accidental deaths for children. I’ve already mentioned that accidental
deaths have gone down so I will put it into context with a quote from an interview that John Lott had back in 1998:

The total number of accidental gun deaths each year is
about 1,300 and each year such accidents take the lives of 200 children
14 years of age and under. However, these regrettable numbers of lives
lost need to be put into some perspective with the other risks children
face. Despite over 200 million guns owned by between 76 to 85 million
people, the children killed is much smaller than the number lost
through bicycle accidents, drowning, and fires. Children are 14.5 times
more likely to die from car accidents than from accidents involving
guns.

Children, heck, anyone getting killed by a person using a gun is a
tragedy for their family and for the country. But guns have also been a
major part of growing up in America and represent a means of protection
and enjoyment for tens of millions of people in this country.
Statistics are showing that firearm crimes are coming down along with
all other crimes and these numbers are happening with a new record for
gun ownership being set every year. Guns are here to stay in America
for a long time still and as long as people who own guns take that
responsibility seriously there’s no reason we should change this
national characteristic. BigT


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