"HeyBub" wrote in message
m...


Firearms ownership comes with responsibility. Anyone who leaves a
firearm unsecured where a child can handle it is an idiot, and in
many jurisdictions a criminal as well. To suggest that kids being
killed by unsecured firearms they find is just "the price we pay" for
security is morally and intellectually repugnant.

I did NOT say "children killed by unsecured firearms;" I said "victims of
gun accidents." I agree with you on the responsibility of securing
firearms.

When it comes to guns there are precious few accidents, but there is plenty
of negligence. Guns don't load and fire themselves, they don't leave
themselves where kids can find them, they don't fire themselves without
being certain of the background, they don't fire themselves at unidentified
targets, and so on. The number of cases where a dog knocks over a lamp that
tips a bowling trophy off a shelf that falls and hits the trigger of a
loaded gun causing it to put a bullet into someone are vanishingly small;
not so with people doing stupid things with firearms, like not locking them
up when kids are around.

That said, children being killed by firearms is not morally and
intellectually repugnant - it is a fact. Facts are not subject to moral
judgements nor intellectual ones.

What a bizarre statement. Gun accidents happen because someone did
something stupid, their actions directly led to someone getting shot. If
you can't see either the moral or intellectual horror in a needless loss of
life due to negligence, well you must be living on a different planet from
most of us. Cops get killed on the job by criminals, it's a fact, but I
find if horrifying nonetheless.

Children die riding their bicycles. Children die in swimming pools.
Children die on the school bus.

In many cases because an adult did something stupid--didn't make the kid
wear a helmet, left the kid in the pool unattended, blew a stop sign and
crashed into the school bus. There are such things as accidents that could
not reasonably be foreseen, that require a complex chain of events to happen
in just the right way. But leaving a loaded gun where a kid can access it
is not one of them.

I agree that owning a firearm carries responsibility. So does owning a
swimming pool or buying a child a bicycle. But irrespective of the
responsibility or diligence, children WILL drown, children WILL get hit by
cars, children WILL die in school bus crashes. And children WILL die from
gunshot wounds.

True, and irrelevant. Doing something negligent that leads to a death is
not excused by the fact that down the street last month a kid died from
slipping in a rain puddle and hitting his head. It's *possible* that an
unlikely mechanical failure will cause someone to lose control of his car
and crash into a school bus. But it's way more likely he was speeding,
talking on his cell phone, and made a last-second lane change when he
realized he was about to miss his off-ramp. You must have worked lots of
traffic accidents, how many were freak occurrences with nobody to blame as
opposed to someone doing something stupid?

The fact that some children will die from a gunshot is no more a reason to
ban guns than children drowning is a sufficient reason to ban swimming
pools.

Can you quote me saying anything about banning guns? No? Then where did
this fly ball come from?