Guns and Children, Letter in today's NY Times
Jane E. Brody’s column claiming that people should store their guns locked and unloaded is dangerous advice and will lead to more deaths (“Is Your Child a Split Second from Disaster?”). Her discussion focuses on accidental gun deaths in the home, but 85 percent of the fatality number she misleadingly points to involve homicides. Surely a concern, but locking up guns in law-abiding homes is unrelated to stopping drug gangs from murdering one another.
Despite her claim, adult males with criminal records and histories of alcoholism or drugs are the ones firing the guns that accidentally kill most young children.
Gun locks won’t stop adult criminals from firing their own guns, but they will prevent law-abiding citizens from defending themselves.
John R. Lott Jr.
Binghamton, N.Y.
Brody's original column can be found here.
Brody tries to correct one of the errors that I point to, but she made it worse. The correction added on August 2nd states: "The Personal Health column in Science Times yesterday, about gun safety, included an incorrect statistic from a medical journal on firearm deaths. They make up about 10 percent of deaths caused by injury among children aged 5 to 14, not 10 percent of all deaths in that age group."
You can find the CDC numbers on this issue here. In 2003, the total number of accidental deaths for children aged 5 to 14 was 2,618. The number of children who died from guns was 49. This is less than 2 percent.
posted by John Lott at 1:14 PM
6 Comments:
Is there a 'child-safety' factor when secondary (non-defense, ie. hunting/ target/ collectible) weapons in the home are "locked"?
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Personal note:
I noticed you placed Binghamton,NY in your Letter.
Are you aquainted with Kevin Wright at SUNY? Tell him 'ABC' from "Rotan" says HI. I will not tell 'stories' on him, as he knows several on me, too.
Dear toyfj40:
Thanks for the note. If the gun can't be used for self defense, there is no cost to locking it up.
Sorry, I don't know Kevin. What department is he in?
Dr. Lott,
Are there any stats on things like the small safes that are intended for keeping a loaded handgun or two in that use a few keypad presses to open? Do you have any opinions/preferences on them?
Thanks, saturdaynightspecial. I appreciate you appreciating the letter.
Dear James S.:
The only thing that we have information on is the requirement to lock guns generally. One problem with even the locks that you ask about is that these requirements price poorer people out of the market for buying guns.
I managed to find an open version of the NY Times article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/health/01brody.html?ex=1155182400&en=af8ce54d934cecb2&ei=5070&emc=eta1
It seems that Brody is prone to making factual errors in her column; here is an excerpt correcting her previous weeks column's mistakes:
Correction
In last week’s column on drowning deaths, I included several statistics that were inaccurate. Here are the correct ones:
In 2003 (the last year for which statistics are available), drowning was the fourth leading cause of death among children ages 1 to 14, after motor vehicle accidents, cancer and birth defects, and the second leading cause of accidental deaths in that age group, according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
The leading cause of accidental death for children under 5 was suffocation, followed by motor vehicle accidents, and then drowning. In most states in 2003 drowning was the second or third leading cause of accidental death for children 14 and younger. The statistics make clear that motor vehicles caused more deaths among children under 5 than swimming pools did.
Someone who keeps making such easilly checked and corrected mistakes shouldn't be writing "advice" columns to the uninformed...
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