The internet is a race, etc.

Yep semantics matter here - "accident" my eye.

@1
and i'm racist toward the internet :)

the Well-Regulated Militia strikes again!

A few dead children is a small price to pay for the freedom to shoot other children.

I guess I'll say it a third time today: strict liability for gun owners whose guns are used in crimes or "accidents" -- particularly those involving unsecured guns in homes where children are present.

dude, dupe.

i'm going to tweet you about AK as a punishment.

Usually people get all worked up about gun control after a "mad gunman" shoots up a public place and kills several. Then the gun dealers answer back by saying that gun control laws won't stop criminals or "mad gunmen" and will only hinder "responsible, law-abiding gun owners" who have a legitimate purpose and right to own a firearm. After all, they say, law-breakers don't care about the laws and won't follow them so it is silly and pointless to try to stop them with laws.

But it is stories like this that get me all worked up. We need laws that require "responsible, law-abiding gun owners" to actually be responsible. They need to be responsible about how they acquire, use, store, and transfer their firearms. Leaving a loaded gun under the bed when there are small children in the house is not responsible storage. That's gross negligence. The child had no business coming into possession of the gun, so the person who allowed the child to possess it was guilty because they didn't responsibly transfer possession of the weapon. These are the laws we need.

We may not be able to stop criminals or "mad gunmen" with laws, but we can stop this carnage.

Perhaps creating a felony negligence criminal act with regard to firearms owners is an answer. With mandatory sentence enhancements for whenever the victim is a minor and double tat for victims under say six years old.

You know I was reading Sam Harris’s Riddle of the Gun and the follow up FAQ on Violence , where he supposedly answer objections he heard after the first one. I was trying to hear from a non-maniac on why guns were supposedly so great.

It turns out that when you get all the way to the end, Harris mainly favors restrictions on gun ownership that are essentially unthinkable now, and would never pass the current Supreme Court: making owning a gun as difficult as getting a private pilot’s license. He grouses about the assault weapons ban being pointless, but in the end, says, “fuck it, pass it so we can change the subject”. So he isn’t exactly an NRA shill.

Except he really is. Because he argues that “guns make you safer”. And he trots out several standard NRA tropes.

Like the swimming pool thing. He supposedly bats away objections to his point about swimming pools being more dangerous to kids than guns, but he fails to answer the central question: What is the relevance of swimming pools, since nobody is arguing that swimming pools make you safer? Harris is essentially saying everybody should get a gun — everybody who isn’t too much of a pussy, basically.

He strongly argues that cars are a worse threat than guns, because the current number of deaths is comparable. He ignores that the fatalities from cars used to be much higher. In Washington, cars used to kill many more than guns; now the number of deaths from traffic has dropped below guns. It shows how much there is to gain from both changing culture and heavy regulation. Which doesn't contradict Harris' support of mandatory training and gun storage, but it doesn't help his "guns make you safer" claim.

He only advocates guns at home, not carrying them, openly or concealed. Which sounds nice, but much of his argument to justify having a gun is based on a broad estimate of the odds of anybody ever being a victim of violence — of any kind, anywhere in their entire lives. In The Truth about Violence he says we each have a 1 in 250 chance per year of being a victim of a violent crime. Which seems like pretty good odds, over time, of needing a gun. Except Harris does a little slight of hand here: since he doesn’t want you carrying a gun outside your home, this number is vastly larger than the odds of being a crime victim in your home.

And further, Harris acknowledges that burglars don’t want to come in your house and tie you up and torture and rape you. They want to take your stuff when you’re not there, and are likely to run, or let you run if they find you at home. So really, the only actual reason he wants a gun at home is to fight off the much, much rarer crime of a home invasion by a sadist who plans on holding you and your family captive and doing unspeakable things to you all.

So he says he accepts the risk of accidents against the chance of needing his gun, but he uses the wrong data to estimate the size of the chance his gun will ever do him any good. The kind of home invasion he imagines is very, very rare. Suicide and accident, and gun theft, are all too common. And "experts" make mistakes with securing their guns every day.

Yet it's this very rare crime, home invasion by a sadist, and this crime alone, that has convinced Harris to put a gun in several, but not every, room of his home. And why he thinks you should too if you’re not a pussy.

Or clinically depressed. Harris thinks he can self-asses his mental stability, plus the fact that he’s never been diagnosed as clinically depressed, he isn’t at risk of suicide. He doesn’t address the sad fact that suicide is an act of opportunity; people who are basically sane can, for a brief moment, become suicidal, and if they have a gun right there, they’ll use it. Hence correlation between gun ownership and suicide, correcting for all other factors. Harris should offer evidence if he doesn't accept these facts; instead he pretends he's never heard of them.

Harris thinks that banning all handguns is impossible because there’s too many, but he doesn’t let that stop him from thinking that forcing all gun owners to undergo really rigorous training and certification is realistic. And he thinks it’s realistic to imagine putting 100,000 highly trained armed guards in all our schools. (The actual number is closer to 500,000, but whatever). If Harris can dream that big, why not dream of decreasing gun ownership to the same level as the UK? It’s disingenuous to accuse those who want to reduce gun ownership of having unrealistic goals, when his dream of a pilot’s license-like hoop to jump through to get a gun is no more practical or likely to happen this decade or next.

Harris talks a lot about all the good an armed guard could have done at Sandy Hook and at other schools. He ignores the most glaring counter example: Columbine. There were not one, but two, armed guards. Not just guards, but sheriff's deputies. They did zero good.

What else? Oh, how about claiming a gun is an "equalizer" for women who are victims of domestic violence? This assumes the victim and the abuser are working to the same goal. Like the victim is really an abuser too, who sometimes gets worked into a rage and if she has a gun she might shoot the abuser. if they were both behaving the same, then giving her a gun would even the chances of either dying. But the victim is in fact behaving differently, trying to placate, de-escalate, and avoid the abuser. It's not like they're both trying to see who can kill the other first. Typically, an abuse victim who decides to get a gun go from hunted to hunter ends up in jail. You only avoid prison in the very rare circumstance where he makes a deadly assault first, the victim survives, and then she is able to get out her gun and shoot. Adding a gun, or a second gun, to a domestic dispute is a recipe for disaster.

Those are some of the major errors I see Harris make. He really likes his guns, and seems willing to work really hard to find reasons to rationalize keeping them.

But swimming pools! (And running with scissors)

@11, I hear you, but if I were killed by an "accidental" discharge I think I would want my heirs and assigns to see the maximum penalty applied to the butterfingers perpetrator.

It's interesting that, regarding my comment here about the Christmas eve baby shooter, the lancasteronline article appears to have been scrubbed of this quote:

...According to the state's crimes code, involuntary manslaughter is a "reckless or grossly negligent" act, either legal or illegal, that causes the death of another person. Typically, the crime is a misdemeanor, unless the victim is under the age of 12, according to the crimes code...

without acknowledgment of the deletion that I can see. Perhaps there was a ruckus raised in the 400+ comments, or perhaps a lobbying organization brought muscle to bear. Who knows?

The Gun Fetish a Death Cult worships the guns. The dead only serve The Lord of Death.

@11
I am ok with this, people should be charged with criminal negligence/manslaughter with a firearms enhancement

@16
That sounds pretty fucking metal, I like it.

Have a heart, charge anyone with a pool not properly gated with criminal negligence every chance you can. For the kids.

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroom/News-Rel…
(Last) year, Pool Safely's focus is on populations most at risk of drowning, including children younger than 5 years old who represent nearly 75 percent of child drowning fatalities and African American and Hispanic children between the ages of 5 and 14 who drown at higher rates than white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Data from USA Swimming indicates that 70 percent of African American children and 62 percent of Hispanic children cannot swim, making them especially vulnerable populations.

"CPSC's Pool Safely campaign has worked to prevent countless drownings, and we will continue to work to save even more lives this year," said Chairman Inez Tenenbaum. "Drowning is still the leading cause of unintentional deaths with children younger than 5. That's why the Pool Safely campaign is encouraging all parents and caregivers of children, especially African American and Hispanic children, to help them learn to swim and to take water safety seriously."

It is funny that in EVERY one of those "example child deaths by handgun" cited by CNN charges were filed. It usually took a few days since there's protocols. It's generally best to give the Medical Examiner time to get all the paperwork done so you're filing charges based on official, court-admissible rulings.

But, hey, don't miss the media cycle and be sure report your outrage over lack of charges one day after it happened..

@18 see @14. Thank you for playing Slog.

@20, I read that drivel at @14 and noticed nobody earlier had defended the argument.

If we were to fill in all residential swimming pools in the US and fill them in we'd save two bus loads of 2-to-a-seat children for every one child who would be saved by removing all the guns from the US. And we'd save a heck of a lot of precious freshwater for mother earth.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/117…

In the one hand I pick up a gun. In the other hand I pick up a swimming pool.

Oh fuck wait I can't pick up a swimming pool.

Why oh why is one of these things not like the other?

@22, you can't pick up a car but apparently they're killing lots of kids too.

@23: Wow you're an idiot.

@24,
What is the point ? Is the fact that most guns are portable a significant part of how they can be used to kill children ? They're tools for shooting bullets at a high velocity. How they're used makes all the difference in the world.

Draino is a reasonable tool for a dense plug of lye to sink down a drain and saponify fats/oils/etc to help them dissolve and make it down to the sewer. It's also very dangerous when used inappropriately/internally (see Hi-Fi Murders).

What you crackpots don't get it that pretty much any responsible gun owners locks up their guns, maybe has a trigger lock on their empty gun, and stores their guns unloaded. The likelihood of any of these guns killing kids if they had a trigger lock and didn't have any ammo in them drops significantly, and the NRA would back you up if you campaigned for free trigger locks for all and stiff penalties for loaded guns being stored in the open.

@10, @11

By the standards of the SLOG, I'm a gun nut and I agree with both of you.

Felony negligence laws would certainly affect the behavior of law-abiding citizens.

ChefJoe called us crackpots. Considering the source, I'm taking that as a compliment.

@25: Most gun owners lock up their guns and store ammo separately. If that's easy to do and a very good idea, why not require it by law, the way most places require smoke detectors in residential buildings?

@28,
I'm supportive of guns locked and stored unloaded. I don't think you'd make much headway saying there needs to be two locked items separated from each other (ammo generally doesn't discharge on its own and a gun without ammo in it is pretty useless). Some places you have to go through some pretty interesting twists to just go to a firing range... guns in one car, buddy in a completely separate car drives the ammo there... simply to avoid any possible concern about how close a gun is to its ammo and if a LEO is going to be PITA.

In my ideal world, it would be very easy for anyone who owns a gun to practice handling it in a safe environment so they're not manipulating it next to their toddler's crib.