Two-Year-Old "Shoots Holes" in NRA Theory

By Mike Coblenz
   
Thursday, January 1, 2015--On December 30, 2014, in Hayden, Idaho a two year old shot and killed his mother.

The woman was shopping at Wal-Mart, with the boy and her purse in the shopping cart.

She had a license for a concealed handgun, and the gun was in her purse in a special zippered pouch for a concealed weapon.

Her son reached into the purse, and the gun fired, killing the woman.

Presumably the boy was playing, and just thought it was a toy, or maybe it was a tragic accident and the child inadvertently hit or squeezed the trigger.

According to a favorite gun advocate slogan, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Hear that, Lapierre? You're golden.

The slogan strongly implies that every killing is intentional, and if a gun is not available the killer will use something else.

Perhaps he would have toddled to the auto supply section and grabbed a tire iron to bash in his mother's brains.

But clearly that idea is as absurd as it is sick.

Now don't you feel like a moron, Lapierre?

The child obviously had no intent to kill his mother (and will undoubtedly be traumatized by it for the rest of his life).

I tend to agree with that, even though it blows a hole in Wayne Lapierre's theory.

Had the gun not been in his mother's purse he may have played with her car keys or cell phone, and she would be alive today.

So clearly it was the gun that killed the woman.

The gun killed the woman, the child didn't kill the woman.

Every year roughly 30,000 Americans are killed by guns.

Of that, roughly 10,000 are murdered, 19,000 commit suicide, and between 500 and 1,000 are killed accidentally.

In 2011, the last year for which data is available, 32,163 people were killed by guns.

Of that 19,766 committed suicide, 11,101 were murdered, and 851 were killed by accidental discharge of a firearm.

There is no way to know about the 10,000 murders, and it is likely that if the murderer did not have a gun he would have used something else.