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1300 kids dead, 100% due to American gun culture and ease of access. Whether a gang banger or a kindergartener, they both gain access to guns in a way that is far easier than it should be and exist in a culture that celebrates that access instead of condemns it.
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Sure, but there are separate problems here that may call for separate solutions that are easier or harder to implement. What leads to six year olds being killed by guns? What leads to 17 year olds being killed by guns? They're fundamentally different. Taking the extreme example I just raised, the sudden outlawing of all gun sales overnight and the reclamation of guns by police, I suspect you'd see a significant drop in gun deaths of six year olds, but a far smaller decrease in the 17-year-old death rate, because of the relative impact of that law. The people killing 17 year olds are less likely to see their practical access restricted by such a law. How can you solve a problem if you don't look into the nuances and fully understand it?
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I don't care if the 1300 is 1300 infants or 1300 17 year old neo-nazis, 1300 kids is an accurate number, right? 0-17, they're kids, yes? And 1300 died from gun violence, yes? Sounds like a pretty straightforward and meaningful statistic to me.
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It is if you want to make a poster about gun control or proclaim your own adherence to the virtuous standard you've selected for yourself. It's not as useful a statistic if you actually care about solutions.
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If anything, it seems like stricter gun control would actually stem gun violence from low-level gang bangers a lot more effectively than it would from little Sara shooting her brother in the head with Dad's legally acquired hunting rifle.
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FFS, finally, Helen Lovejoy moves past the moral grandstanding to something interesting.
Why do you think this the case, that it would have a more significant impact on gang violence than accidental deaths? As I said above, I have the opposite intuition. Also, does your view hold for suicides (which are a large proportion of annual US gun deaths)?