-By Warner Todd Huston
Liberals are still wailing about the “danger” our kids face in schools due to guns in the classroom and mass shootings. But even as Bloomberg’s absurd anti-gun group and others act as if we have some national crisis, the reality of it is that bicycles hurt more kids every year than guns, and not by just a little.
Certainly it is appalling if even one child is hurt in school and outrageous if he is hurt with a gun, but before we get all crazed over the “crisis” of guns in school, we need a bit of perspective.
For instance, left-wing Slate magazine noted just after the crime at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 that 297 kids had been killed in school shooting between 1980 and 2012.
Again, it is horrid that even one child should be killed at school, but let’s look at just a few other statistics to which to compare that three decades of school shootings.
30,000 kids each year are injured in biking accidents, 10,000 require hospitalization. Depending on the year some 200 kids (up to age 18) are killed each year while riding a bike.
In 2011, 1,140 kids died in car accidents while 171,000 were injured.
It is estimated that 4,423 kids are injured each year by amusement park and carnival rides.
98,000 kids are noted in USA Today, recently:
As it happens, the numbers assembled by [Moms Demand Gun Sense in America and Mayors Against Illegal Guns] are not out-of-line with historical patterns, and, in fact, are lower than two decades ago when gang violence was especially problematic at school settings. And, as added perspective, consider that there are more than 50 million school children in America, making the risk of fatality well below one in two million.
So, the claims that gun crime in our schools is somehow “on the rise,” or out of step historically or even higher than that of deaths by other means is simply untrue.
Further, we need these actual facts taken into account before we start making hasty and ill-conceived laws or rules concerning guns, schools and kids.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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