Gun Owners Kill more Children than Kidnappers and Serial Killers Combined
Thanks to over-reporting a few scary cases and an abundance of crime TV dramas, parents today are scared of criminals and “stranger danger.” But the reality shows a different danger should be occupying their minds: guns.
To get the numbers, let’s first ask, how many children are killed by kidnappers? According to the most recent statistics I could find, about 105 children are kidnapped by strangers in the USA per year. Of those, only 8 kids are killed. If you expand the field of perpetrators to everyone the child knows, including their own parents, the numbers go up to 1435 kidnappings and 143 deaths.
How many kids per year are killed by guns? 3000 more. That’s right, 3,143 each year are killed by guns, over 20 times the rate of kidnappers.
I couldn’t find a statistic on how many serial killers kill children. But I did find that overall, serial killers kill about 150 people every year. So even if you assume that all of the victims are children (most are not), guns still kill far more than kidnappers and serial killers combined.
If you own a gun, you are putting your child’s life at risk. Even if you exclude all cases of gun homicide, guns still kill more kids than serial killers and kidnappers combined. How? Over 1100 kids per year kill themselves with a gun, and over a hundred more are killed in gun accidents. Having a gun in the home makes you and your kids less safe.
What about using a gun to protect yourself or your family? Well, that’s a myth. In fact, for every 1 justifiable, self-defense gun homicide, there are 37 criminal gun homicides. Just 274 cases, out of more than 300 million guns. Far less than the child gun suicide rate alone.
To state it more plainly: if you own a gun, your kid is more than 4 times more likely to use it to kill themselves than you are to use it to protect yourself or your family through a self-defense killing.
Not to mention the gun suicide rate among adults, over 20,000. Guns now kill more people than cars do.
What is to be done about this? First of all, if you are a gun owner, get rid of your gun safely. It’s just not worth keeping. Second of all, support more gun control. The ultimate goal should be to ban all guns.
But that won’t happen until we change the culture in this country. A couple of years ago, the Daily Freeman, a local paper in New York, published a letter, which complained: “why are licensed gun owners being treated like social pariahs?”
Of course, gun owners aren’t being treated like pariahs. But they should be. We need to stop treating gun ownership like a hobby or a difference of political opinion and start recognizing it as a life and death matter. Saying “I am a gun owner” should evoke shame and disgust in others, the same way it is today for admitting you are a child abuser.
The only important difference is that, as demonstrated above, guns kill far more kids than child abusers do.
