Yet another child has died from a gunshot wound in the United States.
This time the tragedy that unfolded was of a two-year-old boy who died days after he accidentally shot himself in the head with a pistol. The toddler had grabbed the gun from the top of a dresser as he was playing alone in the bedroom of a house in Meherrin, a village in Lunenburg County, Virginia.
A similar incident happen in April when an infant was shot dead by a three-year-old boy who had picked up an unattended gun in Cleveland. The local police chief Calvin Williams said at the time: “This fascination that we have with handguns, not just in this city but in this country, has to stop. This is a senseless loss of life.”
It is senseless indeed.
FBI data shows that in the between 2004 and 2013, 66 children under the age of 1 were shot and killed in the United States. Between those years a further 363 children between the ages of 1 and 4 died from a gunshot wound.
In total, in that decade 4,207 children 16 or younger were killed from guns in the United Staes. These gun killings constitute 41% of all homicides (10,357) there.
And yet the NRA maintains its mantra that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
See the data: Gun data on child deaths from homicides in the United States 2004 – 2013.
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