Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Allow me to state at the outset that I have absolutely nothing against mothers.
Mothers are wonderful.
Life would be impossible without them - literally.
Over Mother's Day weekend there was a well-publicized event in Washington, D.C.
It was called the Million Moms March. It was a bunch of moms getting together to stump for more gun laws.
I have no problem with moms stumping for gun laws. That certainly is the American way.
People are welcome - encouraged - in this country to get involved and attempt to influence public policy.
But moms, please, don't use scare stats in your attempt.
Scare stats are stats that have little or no statistical value or may even be false or misleading.
But they sound really scary and make people think something needs to be done - some action must be taken.
Guns have always been the target of scare stats.
The infamous 43-to-1 stat has been bandied about for so long that it has become almost universally accepted among anti-gun groups even thought it is, well, false.
That stat, and some of the million moms were tossing it around, says that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to injure or kill a friend or family member than to kill a single intruder.
The fact that 37 of the 43 were suicides is never mentioned. And further, the study includes only dead intruders. If an intruder was scared off or injured, it didn't count.
The fact is that guns are used to scare away or ward off intruders thousands of times - maybe more than a million, depending on the study - each year.
But the 43-to-one study measured the effectiveness of a gun only by the body count in your living room.
Of course that's ridiculous. In reality, a gun in the home has a less than 1 percent chance of injuring or killing someone in that home, according to several different studies. But the anti-gun crowd never seems to like to let facts get in the way of a good scare stat.
The million moms wielded a few good scare stats in their crusade for new gun laws, too.
The organizers of the march have been saying all along that guns are the leading cause of accidental death among children - behind cars.
OK. That statement in and of itself is dumb. Why not just say guns are the second leading cause of death among children? Not dramatic enough, I guess.
But are guns even the second leading cause of accidental death?
Let's see.
First of all, I'm not sure I count all those 15- to 19-year-olds as children. That brings in all the gang bangers and inner city dope dealers who are most likely to be accidentally - or intentionally, for that matter - shooting one another or themselves.
But anyway, even if you count all those 18- and 19-year-old "children," guns accidentally killed 306 in 1997. (1997 is the most recent year data are available.)
Let's compare that with other "leading" causes of accidental death.
Mechanical suffocation, 529; smoke and fire, 723; drowning, 1,269; and cars, 8,113.
Fact is, guns aren't even a close second, third or fourth leading cause of accidental deaths.
And if you really want to talk about kids - I mean kids under age 5 - there were 20 deaths attributed to guns in 1997. Comparatively, 22 kids in that age group were killed by toys.
Since 1945, the number of guns has more than doubled but the number of gun injuries has fallen by more than 60 percent.
The truth is, there are somewhere between 220 million and 250 million guns in America and there are 2,000 non-fatal gun injuries per year.
There are all kinds of interesting statistics out there.
Falls - down stairs, off ladders, etc., - kill some 4,000 people every year.
Nobody seems to care about that. Nobody says, "Eleven people a day are being killed by gravity. We need to educate our children and our country about the dangers of gravity."
But the gun thing is highly publicized, sometimes to the point of exaggeration. And it is the latest politically incorrect thing to hammer on.
The million moms propose licensing handgun owners, cooling off periods and background checks at gun shows, safety locks and no-nonsense enforcement of gun laws.
Those ideas are OK, but most of those things will not curb gun violence.
I have a tough time imagining an armed robber or gang banger registering his weapon or using a trigger lock. Background checks, like most gun laws, only apply to law-abiding citizens.
Only the increased enforcement idea has the propensity to actually do some good.
I think the million moms are aiming at the wrong target.
Guns aren't what got us here. Failed public policies are. I think the moms should be more concerned with things like illegitimacy, unemployment, dysfunctional schools, substance abuse and a general lack of morality in this country.
If we got that stuff in order, I think the gun violence "problem," exaggerated as it is, would take care of itself.
