Kids, guns and Dr. Phil

[Kickaha]

Kids, guns and Dr. Phil
by Larry Elder
http://www.larryelder.com/

Move over Mr. Anti-Second Amendment Michael Moore, and make way for Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil recently aired a program in which he staged an experiment to demonstrate the danger of guns in the home. Amid a group of playing little girls and boys, a teacher placed two fake guns inside a dollhouse. The teacher warned the kids not to play with the guns, and then left the room. The mindful girls left the guns alone even after the teacher left the room.

The experimenters took the girls out of the room. The boys promptly began playing with the guns. Dr. Phil came in, warned the boys again, and after eliciting a promise not to play with the guns, which he put on a table, he left the room. Again, the boys promptly began playing with the guns. Moral to the story? Guns in the home and children -- especially boys -- simply don't mix. Never mind that responsible parents rarely leave guns, let alone loaded ones, inside a girl's dollhouse or on a table near the children.

Dr. Phil said, "America kills more kids with guns than any other industrialized nation," later adding, "There are five children a day killed with guns through either accidents or suicides. Five children a day in America are killed with guns." The five children per day figure adds up to over 1,800 per year.

Hold tape.

Dr. Phil never defined what he meant by "children." Independence Institute researcher Dave Kopel notes that many of the reported gun deaths involving "children" include those aged 14 through 19, many of them gangbangers. If, by children, Dr. Phil meant 10 and under, approximately 50 children -- or less than one child per state per year under 10 -- die from handgun violence.

Dr. Phil specifically said gun "accidents and suicides." Yet the Center for Disease Control, which tracks all causes of death, reports only 86 accidental deaths in kids aged 14-years-and-under in the year 2000, and 110 suicides, for a total of 198. Not exactly 1,800. (Even if Dr. Phil intended to include homicide and undetermined intent, the total of kids aged 14-and-under killed by firearms in 2000, according to the CDC, was 435.)

By contrast, the CDC reported 943 accidental drownings of kids aged 14-and-under, 593 deaths from accidental exposures to smoke and fire, and 2,591 killed in motor vehicle accidents. Surely one child dying through handgun violence -- or any kind of violence -- is one child too many, but we should not lose perspective.

Dr. Phil went further. In front of the largely female -- and often instinctively anti-gun group -- audience, Dr. Phil added this headline, "More children die from gunfire than cancer, pneumonia, flu, asthma and HIV/AIDS combined. Do you know what your child would do if he found a gun and you weren't there?"

Hold tape.

According to the CDC, the annual deaths from cancer in 2000, for children aged 14-years-and-under, was 1,939. Add in the number of 14-and-under who die every year from pneumonia and flu, at 479, plus 169 kids killed by asthma, plus 70 from HIV, and we have a grand total of 2,657, a number higher than Dr. Phil's figure of 1,800 children allegedly killed each year through handgun accidents and suicide.

As usual with programs stacked against guns, Dr. Phil failed to even address the number of children saved by handguns per year. In other words, how many kids remain with us because Mommy or Daddy -- or in some cases a child -- used a gun to defend the household. According to the Department of Justice, Americans use guns for defensive purposes 1.5 million times a year. And, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention -- a division of the Justice Department -- the government found that children taught appropriate use of guns by their parents turn out to be far less likely to use those guns for criminal purposes than those without such instruction.

Recently, in South Bend, Ind., a thug broke into a home occupied by an 80-year-old grandmother and her 10-year-old grandchild. The intruder held a jagged box cutter to the grandmother's neck, at which time the 10-year-old bolted upstairs where he retrieved his father's gun, the responsible use of which his dad taught him. The 10-year-old returned, pointed the gun at the intruder, and shot and killed him. "The young man reasonably believed his grandmother and himself to be in danger of dying," the South Bend police said. "It was clear to us this was a justifiable homicide. He did what he had to do."

Some suggestions: Don't go to your gun store for psychological counseling; and don't go to a mental health therapist for advice on guns.

[Welby]

Thanks for posting that, Kickaha.

It's very angering when personalities like him pop up on the scene, make a big name for themselves, and then push an agenda based on facts that are at best exaggerated and at worst completely false altogether.

Makes you just want to take his little tail behind the woodshed for awhile and wear him out into the middle of next week.

But wait, isn't he against that kind of discipline? Maybe that's the real problem.

[shadow]

What he doesn't tell you is that the countries he compare's us against do not allow guns in the hands of civilians and some don't even allow it for the peace officer's. The definition of children could be viewed diff. from one person to another. Heck government agencies can't even agree on what is concidered a child and the lawers address a 16 yr old as an adult or child as they need to to win their case...we confuse ourselves and try to lay more wieght to something than that which is warranted thus taking away from real problems. As stated 50 children from age 10 and younger die but that's out of how many...granted even one is a tragic but to call it a crisis....

[Marty]

He's a product of Oprah, plain and simple. Ask any of them what their body guards carry. Squirt guns?
Oh. So we can protect Dr. Phil, but not children?

[sportyg]

Gee can we file a class action suite against him...

[Slugblaster]

Pardon my ignorance but who is DR Phil? I don't watch daytime TV. I have a job. At night I watch Gunsmoke.

[mi-hunter]

Does this guy live next to rosie?? I trust my son with my guns more than most adults.when my son was growing up i would bring all my guns out on the living room floor and let him play,handle,and ask all the ?'s he wants.I still keep them all locked up but,he knows how to work every one of them.i have always been real stricked with his gun handleing even with his red ryder.10 yrs ago. my son is able to defend our home and a very safe gun handler out hunting.I think him seeing me shoot a couple of whitetails with a 12 ga he knew what the damage was of a gun.this is our future we must protect it.

[Kickaha]

Originally posted by Slugblaster@Jan 11 2003, 07:03 PM
Pardon my ignorance but who is DR Phil? I don't watch daytime TV. I have a job. At night I watch Gunsmoke.

Dr. Phil is the latest liberal psyco-babble pop star and has quite a following. He was spawned from the bowels of Oprah.

[Dakota]

Good post kick,

Now the question is.... How does one get the REAL statistics in front of the people? We don't have the media avocates the libs do.

[shaginator]

All that demonstration illustrated is why guns should not be left around the house with unsupervised kids. Ok... duh?

The number one killer of children from 1-14? Car accidents. Number two? Drownings. Number three? Burnings.

It's all there, available from the CDC.

Putting junior in that minivan with a mentally unstable parent (I suppose the kind desperately need advice from Dr. Phil) puts him at orders of magnitude higher risk than a gun in a safe. Or AIDS for that matter...