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Another Voice: We need to protect our children from gun violence [buffalonews.com]

 

As pediatricians, we see the toll of too many firearms: children who are killed and injured, children who are exposed to violence, and children who live in fear, every day, of being shot.  We say enough.

It’s not just the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, or any number of mass school shootings in recent years.  It’s also shootings that happen in and outside the home, whether murder, suicide, or unintentional. Every year over two thousand children and teenagers die from firearms.  Tens of thousands are injured. Firearm-related deaths are one of the top three causes of death in childhood, and for adolescents, the second leading cause.

The issue is straightforward. There are more than 350 million guns in circulation in the United States – more than one gun per person – and approximately one in three households with children have guns.  Children are naturally curious and impulsive and the brain does not fully mature until the early 20s.  The majority of young children know where their parents keep their firearms and a significant percentage have handled those firearms.  Almost 9 out of 10 unintentional shooting deaths occur in the home, often from children playing with a loaded gun.  Suicide rates are higher in households with firearms because firearms are highly lethal.

[For more on this story by Dennis Z. Kuo and Gale R. Burstein, go to http://buffalonews.com/2018/03...n-from-gun-violence/]

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