More pressing dangers at home than guns
Editor’s Note: Nurture is a bi-annual publication on parenting and children produced by the Advocate.
Regarding “Where are the guns when your kids have a play date?” this article in Nurture Spring 2015 starts out as reasonable advice to parents with cause for concern for their kids’ safety on “play dates.” It then quickly morphs into typical anti-gun bait-and-switch double-think.
Specifically, I’m referring to the boldface header: “18,000+ youth are injured or killed each year due to gun violence.” OK — now we were talking about “play dates” here — right? How did we get to generalized “gun violence” from there?
A journalist who conducted reasonable research would have found that much of that “18,000+” consists of homicide. These kids do, however, count as “youth” in any such statistic and unfortunately inflate that number. Or perhaps your journalist or her source just thought they didn’t count them? Just read any urban newspaper. This violence in no way, shape, or form correlates with “play dates.”
Within the context of this article this misappropriated statistic implies that 18,000+ kids are blowing each other’s brains out every year with legally permitted loaded firearms they discovered in daddy’s top drawer during a visit with their friend. That’s garbage.
As to the “asking saves kids” premise, only in La-La Land do we assume that a person who knowingly keeps an illegal firearm in their home will tell some kid’s parent that they have it or where they keep it.
Here are some more important questions: Do you have medications or drugs in the home? Do you keep alcoholic beverages in the home? What safety features does your swimming pool have? Are your children vaccinated for measles and pertussis? More kids are probably poisoned, drowned, sickened, and injured from any single one of those each year than by accidental firearm discharges during play dates.
The Advocate should do better than that. I’m disappointed.
Play ball!
There’s nothing like being out on the field again — the thrill you get is well worth the time investment, never mind the great people you’ll meet. Give playing baseball a shot if you’re even considering it — you won’t be disappointed.
