Quote:CLAIM: Toddlers killed more Americans than terrorists in 2015.

TRUE

WHAT'S TRUE: Broad counts indicate that 21 toddlers shot and killed themselves or others in 2015; 19 Americans died at the hands of potential or suspected Islamic terrorists.

Quote:What do you say about the outspoken Florida “gun rights” advocate who left a loaded .45 calibre handgun in the back seat of her car and was promptly shot and wounded by her four-year-old child? I take no pleasure in violence and pain. I’m not happy that Jamie Gilt, 31 – who has built a thriving web presence on the argument that guns are not only perfectly safe around kids, but necessary for their protection – left a loaded handgun in reach of her four-year-old son, who then picked it up, aimed it at his mother, and pulled the trigger. I find zero delight in the thought of Gilt’s toddler’s almost certain panic and horror in that moment, nor the guilt he may well carry for the rest of his life (guilt that only his mother deserves). I’m sure being shot in the back really hurts – even more so when it comes with a side of nationwide liberal schadenfreude.

But I have no interest in letting Gilt off the hook. Her child could just as easily have shot himself, or a passerby, or someone else’s child. With just a few tweaks of location and circumstance, he could have shot my child. Someone else still could, accidentally or with intention – it’s a possibility you have to consider in a country with so many guns and so few laws regulating them. That’s the macabre truth of parenting in 21st-century America.

1. Islamic terrorism actually kills very few people in the US (the risk of being killed accidentally by a todler with a gun is higher)
   
2. The proposed measures, going to war elsewhere, carpet bombing, stigmatizing, deportation, locking the border, are not only very expensive, disproportional and involve a lot of collateral damage, many of these proposed measures are also likely to simply be counterproductive. 
   

Quote:Since 2009, the NRA and its allies in state capitols have pushed through 99 laws making guns easier to own, easier to carry in public—eight states now even allow them in bars—and harder for the government to track. More than two-thirds of the laws were passed by Republican-controlled legislatures, though often with bipartisan support. (Note: Click on the colored states for details on additional laws; info on a few particularly noteworthy ones follows below the map. Also see our related story on the frightening rise of mass shootings in the US.)

Quote:Another part of that article was also interesting:

In the US in 2015, more people were shot and killed by toddlers than by terrorists. In 2013, the New York Times reported on children shot by other children: “Children shot accidentally – usually by other children – are collateral casualties of the accessibility of guns in America, their deaths all the more devastating for being eminently preventable.”

And I’m supposed to believe that frightened Syrian refugees – or whomever becomes the next rightwing scapegoat du jour – are the real threat to my children? I’m supposed to be afraid of sharks? Heavy metal music? Violent video games? Horse meat in my hamburger patties? Teenagers pouring vodka up their butts?

States with more guns have more gun deaths. Keeping a gun in your house increases your chances of accidental death by shooting, but does not make you safer. A woman’s chance of being murdered by an abusive partner increases fivefold if the partner has access to a gun. “Good guys with guns” are a fantasy. How much longer will we keep participating in this great collective lie that deadly weapons keep us safe?

Quote:Carter was among the last children shot that day, a 24-hour stretch of gun violence that, according to police reports, left girls and boys from one coast to the other maimed or dead. About 1:10 a.m., in Kansas City, Mo., 803 miles from Cleveland, Jedon Edmond found a gun in his parents’ apartment and pulled the trigger, accidentally firing a round into his face. Jedon, who died at a hospital, was 2. Eighty minutes later, Damien Santoyo was standing on a porch in Chicago as a car drove by, and someone inside opened fire, striking the 14-year-old in the head. He died at the scene. Less than two hours after that, at almost the exact same moment, a 15-year-old boy in Louisville was blasted in both legs outside a club, and a 16-year-old girl in Danville, Va., was fatally wounded on a street corner by a round meant for someone else. Then, on a Metro car just outside the nation’s capital, an 18-year-old man accidentally shot his 14-year-old half brother in the stomach. Then, in Kansas City, Kan., three teenagers were shot inside a car, and two of them, one 16 and the other 17, were killed. Then, in a parking lot in High Point, N.C., a 14-year-old boy caught in crossfire was struck in the arm. 

Finally, at 11:50 p.m. on an Ohio highway, 4-year-old Carter was stalked in his car seat. Hill allowed The Washington Post to tell his story and to interview him, his family, and his nurses and doctors because she wanted people to understand all that he endured. What led to his shooting, she said, began earlier that night. She was leaving her mother’s apartment complex with Carter and Dahalia when they came upon the white Pontiac blocking the road. She honked and waited, until finally the car backed out of the way. It followed her onto the interstate. Then came the gunfire. On average, 23 children were shot each day in the United States in 2015, according to a Post review of the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. That’s at least one bullet striking a growing body every 63 minutes. In total, an estimated 8,400 children were hit, and more died — 1,458 — than in any year since at least 2010. That death toll exceeds the entire number of U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan this decade. Many incidents, though, never become public because they happen in small towns or the injuries aren’t deemed newsworthy or the triggers are pulled by teens committing suicide. Caring for children wounded by gunfire comes with a substantial price tag. Ted Miller, an economist who has studied the topic for nearly 30 years, estimated that the medical and mental health costs for just the 2015 victims will exceed $290 million.

Dowd can rattle off number after number to illustrate the country’s crisis, but few are more jarring than a study of 2010 World Health Organization data published in the American Journal of Medicine last year: Among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by gunfire lived in the United States.

Quote:A 3-year-old boy in Texas died on Saturday after finding a loaded gun that fell out of a family member's pocket and accidentally shooting himself in the chest, authorities said. The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office said in a press release that deputies responded to a 911 call for a welfare check in Porter, Texas, and found the child with a gunshot wound. The unnamed boy later died. Authorities said family members had gathered for the child's birthday party and were playing cards when they heard a gunshot and discovered the child.