You don't have to believe in the general line of NRA politics to support the NRA Foundation. It's a completely separate 501(c)3 organization with completely separate funding, whose goal is to teach firearm safety, law enforcement training, conservation, hunter eduction, and women's self defense, among other things. The NRA Foundation doesn't lobby and doesn't engage in political campaigning. It strictly provides grant money in support of eligible educational programs.
If your dislike of the NRA is so strong that you simply cannot support such a mission, you could support Project ChildSafe of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
http://nssf.org/safety/education.cfm
The very first paragraph of the NSSF's ChildSafe page says this:
"The number one way to prevent accidents and unauthorized access to firearms is to ensure guns are securely stored when not in use. Storing firearms responsibly is a 365-day-a-year obligation, and if someone cannot or will not accept that obligation, we strongly urge them not to own a firearm."
Can you disagree with that? Will you support Project ChildSafe?
A little further down that page:
"That’s why NSSF launched Project ChildSafe in 1999. It’s a national program to promote firearms responsibility, provide safety education to all gun owners, and distribute free gun locks in communities across the country. To date, Project ChildSafe has provided more than 36 million free firearm safety kits through partnerships with law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and five U.S. territories. Over the past decade, the number of accidental firearm fatalities has dropped by more than 20 percent"
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Of course it requires that the people actually use them and not just own.
The rate of unintentional firearm deaths and injuries has been consistently decreasing for decades. As you know, it can be difficult to impossible to assign cause to effect. E.g., drunk driving deaths have been decreasing for decades. Is it because of educational and awareness programs? Is it because of stronger penalties for people who get caught driving drunk? Is it because of safer cars and safer roads? Is it because of better first-responder and ER medical care? I don't know, but I don't slam awareness and educational programs about the dangers of drunk driving because I can't absolutely prove their effectiveness.
Yeah, if you go by the national statistics it's impossible to show clear cause and effect because there are so many factors influencing things at the same time.
But on an individual level it would be possible to demonstrate changes if the programs are effective. Just study children who took part and verify that the programs change their behavior t and they're more likely to obey the safety instructions that they have received. Only that doesn't seem to be what the research shows, it shows that many kids learn to recite safety instructions but still play with guns regardless if they happen to find them.
Or do a case control-study and find out if the children who were involved in firearm accidents were more or less or equally likely to have received gun safety training. (I tried looking but wasn't able to find such a study, maybe someone has better luck.)
It may be totally impossible to ever demonstrate the effectiveness of the programs, if they're in fact ineffective.
Programs that don't change children's behavior in anywhere but the training setting aren't usually doing much.
I see that MADD takes total credit for the reduction in drunk driving deaths.
http://www.madd.org/drunk-driving/about/history.html
"When MADD was founded in 1980, more than 21,000 people were killed in drunk driving crashes each year. Since then, we've been able to cut that deadly toll in half, but there is still more work to be done."
Sadly, drunk drivers still cause about 10,000 deaths per year in the U.S. -- about 10 times the number of unintentional firearm injuries. People drink and then get in their cars and go barreling down the highway, and they kill 10,000 people a year doing that. But we don't refer to a "stupid obsession with drinking and driving culture" and we don't refer to cars as "instruments of death."
I think that "instruments of death" quote has been fully covered now.
"the stupid obsession with gun culture" quote wasn't even my words to begin with so I'm not sure why you keep bringing it up in your responses to me as if I need to keep defending that.
The fact is that despite anyone's obsession with unintentional firearm injuries, they are in fact freakishly rare. Every firearm safety course I've taken has emphasized the need to keep guns out of the hands of young children. Every firearm manual that came with every firearm I've ever bought has emphasized the need to keep guns out of the hands of young children. I doubt there's any gun owner in existence who isn't aware that leaving a loaded gun where a toddler can get his hands on it can result in tragedy. And yet.... sadly, people aren't perfect, and people make mistakes.
We have covered freakishly rare. You think it's freakishly rare, I think it's not. I don't think it's a fact that it's freakishly rare, it's your value evaluation. If it was freakishly rare I wouldn't expect to find so many cases of kids with guns on WS.
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...tally-shooting-self-at-Detroit-west-side-home
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...ear-old-boy-dies-after-NJ-accidental-shooting
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...after-accidentallly-shooting-himself-with-Uzi
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...rl-accidentally-shoots-kills-instructor-with-
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...Fayetteville-girl-accidentally-shoots-herself
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...identally-Shoots-and-Kills-2-Year-Old-Brother
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...ice-5-year-old-girl-fatally-shoots-self-in-La
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...Kentucky-boy-fatally-shoots-2-year-old-sister
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...lly-shoots-her-2-year-old-brother-in-Missouri
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/sh...d-Girl-Accidentally-Shoots-Sleeping-Mom-Twice
Not even mentioning the cases where teens shot somebody on purpose, and must have got the gun somewhere.
The perception that this is so freakishly rare that it will not happen to us may be contributing to some of these cases. Parents frequently overestimate their own kids' gun safety behavior and think that this is something that happens to other people's dumber kids. Thus becoming less vigilant.
No laws will ever change that hard, cold fact. We will always, forever, have some number of fatalities every year due to someone's momentary inattention or lapse in judgment. Sometimes it will be children who die. Children will drown in pools, at beaches, in ponds, and in 5-gallon buckets. Children will get into moIm's medicine. Children will drink cleaning solutions. Children will fall off ladders. Children will play with fire and will stick metal things into electrical outlets.
Children frequently take their parents by surprise at their ability to do things, go places, and get into things that their parents didn't know they were capable of doing, going, or getting into.
Yes that is perfectly true. I don't dispute any of that. That's precisely the reason why parents need to think long and hard about where and how to store their firearms if they choose to keep them at home.
Some years ago, there was a boy in the neighborhood where I lived -- he was 3 at the time -- who climbed onto his parents' bedroom dresser while they slept and grabbed their car keys, snuck out of the house, got into the family car, drove it down the street, hit several parked cars and ended up in a ditch. A month later, that same little boy burned down the family's house while playing with a cigarette lighter. Seriously. Yeah, I got a link for anyone who doesn't believe me:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...K1NAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gPwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6966,1962825
Parents of young children need to be more vigilant, even while asleep, than is humanly possible. Fortunately, most of us manage to get our children to adulthood without something tragic happening, but I would submit that in almost all cases, and possibly
all cases, it's not because we were perfect parents but because we were simply lucky.
Yeah, agreed. People need a lot of luck to keep all the bad things from happening to their children. Everyone's had some tight situations that could have ended badly but luckily didn't.
But you don't need to be either perfect or lucky to keep your own kids away from your own guns if you store them right.
