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At the National Rifle Association convention in Houston, Texas this week, an NRA speaker and firearms instructor named Rob Pincus told gun owners to stash guns in their kids’ rooms as a home defense precaution.

Pincus pretended that it was completely safe to store guns in the same room where children play and horse around, much to the amusement of the pro-gun audience.

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“If you’re worried that your kid is going to try to break into the safe that is in their bedroom with a gun in it, you have bigger problems than home defense,” Pincus said. “If you think that the kid who’s going to try to break into the safe because it’s in their room isn’t sneaking into your room to try to break into stuff, you’re naive and you have bigger problems than this. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with staging the gun where you’re most likely to barricade [yourself]. If you have to run across the house to check on the kids, there’s no reason to take them out of the bathroom and move them to some other room when the bad guy might be wandering around your house.”

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Since 1979, over 116,385 children have had their lives cut tragically short by guns. Psychology Today reports:

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In 2008-2009, the number of kids killed by guns was 5,740. “That’s one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years… 34,387 kids suffered guns injuries in 2008-2009—that’s one child or adolescent every 31 minutes.” This shocking information comes from the Children’s Defense Fund and the statistics are from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/whats-in-name/201212/20-children-i
n-newtown-116385-kids-killed-1979]
5,740 kids in two years alone. That’s approximately 600 MORE killed than the number of US soldiers killed during the same two year period in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. In other words, more children die in America because of gun fire than soldiers do in wars overseas. That statistic should be absolutely unacceptable to any decent human being. Yet the NRA is actually urging gun owners to place guns in rooms where children sleep and play. To be fair, the NRA speaker advised putting the guns in a gun safe, but we know not all parents will do that. Somewhere in America, a parent who worships the NRA will improperly store a loaded handgun in their own child’s bedroom where it can be easily accessed, and then one day the child will get hold of that gun and another tragedy will be reported in the news. Don’t believe it? Incidents like this have already happened.

Last week, a gun owner left out a loaded handgun. A five-year-old boy grabbed the gun and killed his little sister with it. Another tragedy occurred in the home of a deputy sheriff. The gun was left out on the bed and the deputy’s little boy got hold of it and shot the wife. These are just two of the many other tragedies that have occurred because of the “safety practices” of “responsible gun owners.”

The NRA profits off of dead kids every day. The right-wing organization protects gun manufacturers and dealers from prosecution, regulation, and critical oversight that could save thousands of lives every year. How many more kids have to die before we say enough is enough and strip away the special treatment the Second Amendment has enjoyed above all of the other rights Americans have? We have the freedom of speech but it’s against the law to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. We have the right to assemble but we need permits to do so. If there are sensible exceptions on all of our other rights, why can’t we finally tack one or two onto the Second Amendment? Our children are our future. How many futures will be forever lost if we continue to allow the NRA to control the gun debate and the Republican Party? The time to save lives is long overdue. Are we really going to allow the NRA to prevent us from doing so?

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If you can stomach it:

Note: "Guns still kill twice as many children and young people as cancer, five times as many than heart disease and 15 times more than infection, according to the New England Journal of Medicine ( http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1215606)."

Bear in mind doing so means you have a locked safe--hopefully combination, 'cuz anyone can get a key if they really want to--so if you have a break in, you have to run to the room, lock the door, and open that safe faster than anyone can get through the door...but hey, it's a great idea, n'est-ce pas?

Blows the mind, it does. Of course, the reasoning is obvious--"Have more than one gun stashed around" (Reads: "Buy more guns".)

I found this interesting: "If you think that the kid who’s going to try to break into the safe because it’s in their room isn’t sneaking into your room to try to break into stuff, you’re naive and you have bigger problems than this." Makes me wonder how he, and apparently many others, grew up. I never once went into my parents' room to sneak around and get into stuff; obviously I missed out as a kid. I stole change from the top of my dad's dresser a couple of times, so I'm no angel, but it never occurred to me to go rustling around in my parents' bedrooms just to find stuff to get into... Just struck me.

Reminder: I DO NOT WANT TO TAKE AWAY ANYONE'S GUNS, remember? I argue for SOME logical restrictions to the number of guns out there and who is allowed to have them. And I certainly argue against children having guns of ANY kind, much less guns hidden in their bedrooms!

What a country we are becoming...

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In the early 1990s, there was a surge of violence and firearm-related deaths. The death rate was so high (nearly 28 of every 100,000 people 15 to 19 years of age)2 that pediatricians joined with other professionals (police officers, clergy, and educators) to find ways to combat the epidemic. Pediatricians began to address the protection of children from gun-related causes alongside the prevention of other types of injuries, poisonings, child abuse, lead toxicity, and infectious diseases.

Screening tools and basic interventions became routine practice through nationally accepted programs such as Connected Kids and Bright Futures. AAP guidelines recommend that when families report the presence of firearms in the house, pediatricians should counsel about gun removal and safety measures (gun locks and safe storage). One mother responded to routine screening questions asked by one of our colleagues, “Why, yes, I have a loaded gun in the drawer of my bedside table.” Until that moment, she had apparently never considered the risk to her child.
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In a randomized, controlled, cluster-design study by the Pediatric Research in Office Settings network, the intervention group that received specific gun-safety counseling from their doctors reported significantly higher rates of handgun removal or safe storage than did the control group. This study showed that families do follow through on pediatricians' recommendations about gun safety.4

Despite this evidence, in 2011, Florida passed legislation, the Firearms Owners' Privacy Act, making it illegal for a doctor to conduct preventive screening by asking families about guns in the home — essentially “gagging” health care providers. Under the aegis of the Second Amendment, the First Amendment rights and the Hippocratic responsibilities of physicians were challenged. In response, the AAP's Florida chapter brought suit, and in June 2012, Miami-based U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke issued a permanent injunction banning the state from enforcing the law. Governor Rick Scott has appealed the ruling, and similar bills have been introduced in three additional states.

At the federal level, problematic language was introduced into the Affordable Care Act. Section 2717(c) sets restrictions on the collection and aggregation of data on guns in the home. Furthermore, Congress has restricted the research activities of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by stipulating that no funds that are made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”5 Strictures like these often have a chilling effect on the gathering of important public health data.
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As a nation, we have it in our power to protect our children from gun injuries, as other countries have done. (They make several suggestions, among them:) Federal restrictions on the collection of public health data about gun-related injuries should be reversed. Excerpts from http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1215606

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