Link: Farmington Daily Times - Police stress gun safety.
Excerpt - first paragraph:
No parent expects their gun to kill their child — but it happens too often, said Dan Patterson, an investigator with the La Plata County Sheriff's Office.
Excerpt - last paragraph:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 297 children between the ages of 5 and 14 were killed by accidental gunfire between 1999 and 2003. That amounts to less than 1 child in 100,000 being killed by accidental gunfire.
That's less than 100 per year in a nation of 300 million people. Other risks posing a greater danger to kids (drowning in water buckets, crossing the street) are ignored by the press, which continues to sensationalize gun accidents. Accidents have dropped even as gun ownership has rapidly expanded. Accidents are highly preventable in this age group through gun education, yet groups with an anti-gun agenda (American Academy of Pediatrics, for example) have opposed gun education in schools, even if it is simply teaching kids to stay away from guns.