Wacky Pax Fact
Keeping Tabs On Your 19-Year-Old?s Playmates
by dischord
(distribution permitted and encouraged)

The annals of gun grabbing are full of grossly exaggerated claims, especially when it comes to dangers to ?children.? But the following whopper by Pax USA really takes the 19-year-old ?child? factoid to a new level.

The group seems to have two goals: 1) to collect 1 million youth signatures for a petition to be sent to Congress (I don?t know what the petition actually says, because you have to join to read it) and 2) to get parents to ask their children?s playmate?s parents about the presence of guns in the home and whether those guns are safely secured.

On its page ?10 Important Facts About Gun Violence,? Pax includes this factoid:

?In the United States a child is killed with an unlocked and loaded gun every 2.5 hours.?
(http://www.paxusa.org/?m=p&g=library/i_library.html&e_e=39d9368518f33acc_6387)

Did you catch what the Pax folk are doing?

1) At one every 2.5 hours, that?s about 3,500 deaths. To get that many deaths, you have to count everyone 19 and under.

2) By including the phrase ?unlocked and loaded,? especially on a site dedicated to finding out whether people store their guns locked and unloaded, they are implying that the lack of trigger locks and whatnot are directly responsible for these 3,500 deaths.

Not only do they use the highly misleading ?child? count that includes includes 19-year-olds, they intentionally imply that the 3,500 deaths involve young children finding daddy?s loaded gun.

They are attempting to whip up fear . However, the facts are that most of these deaths are to older teens for who trigger locks are af little deterrent, most of these deaths do not occur in homes, and many of the shooters are not children, 19-year-old or otherwise. The truth is that play-related gun deaths to children ? even to those 19-year-old toddlers ? are quite rare.

Yep, parents have a vital and solemn responsibility to keep their guns out of kids? reaches. Yep, other parents have a right to ask if and how you secure your firearms. But, please, stop exaggerating the danger. Stop scaring people with lies. Stop creating false impressions about the level of risk that gun ownership poses to households.

Such scare mongering wrongly stigmatizes gun owners.