Guns and children and the gun crazies with their heads up their asses

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Read this very powerful piece at Slate:

What does the body of a 6-year-old girl look like after a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle's high-velocity bullets rip through her? The average 6-year-old girl weighs about 44 pounds and stands around 3 feet 9 inches tall. The size of her organs and the diameters of her arteries and veins, bowel, and bones are much smaller than an adult's. But a 6-year-old girl is not a miniature adult; her organs are more vulnerable and less protected by bones. So when a high-velocity projectile like a .223-caliber bullet, traveling at approximately 2,000 miles per hour, from an assault weapon like a Bushmaster AR-15, enters her body, all hell breaks loose. If that bullet pierces her chest wall into her heart, it will cause her heart to explode, and if it passes within 3 inches of her aorta, the shockwaves will tear it open. If it slices into her arm, it will shatter her humerus into so many fragments that it will no longer be recognizable as a bone. If it spirals into her brain, the cavity and damage the bullet causes will be so extensive that her head will break apart.

Guns kill kids. In 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2,694 children and teens in the United States died because of a firearm. Another 15,578 children and teens were injured. Every 30 minutes, a child is killed or injured by a gun. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the largest organization of pediatricians, recommends that conversations about guns and gun safety start during a prenatal visit and be repeated every year as part of anticipatory guidance. Those conversations start with a question: "Do you own a gun?"

And yet the NRA, its Republican allies (like Florida's Rick Scott), and the various other gun nuts who believe in a deeply flawed interpretation of the Second Amendment and who have succumbed either to paranoia or to fetishism, and often to both, are trying to block even this, seeking to prevent doctors from engaging in any sort of discussion about guns with their patients -- this in a gun-crazy culture with a pandemic of gun violence. 

As I wrote last night, it's time for Americans, governing themselves, to put an end to this madness.