And your point is?

Guns are a touchy subject with me. They always have been, and always will be. You see, I rarely see a single object so vilified as the gun. Sitting in a room, not being touched, it is harmless. It takes motion to cause it to discharge, sending it’s projectile down the barrel with supersonic velocity. That motion is almost always generated by man, whether through intention or negligence. And yet, it’s the gun that gets the blame.

The latest hit piece against the firearm came yesterday from MSNBC (shocking, right?).

The piece reports that rural kids are just a likely to be killed by a gun as urban youth, and then goes on to lay out that most of these rural kids die in either firearm related accidents or suicides. The author of the report being cited says this:

“This debunks the myth that firearm death is a big-city problem,” said lead author Dr. Michael Nance of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “This is everybody’s problem.”

Really?  Everyone’s problem?

First, it’s absolutely idiotic to consider suicides in such statistics.  Suicide is the result of mental illness, and it’s pretty well understood that if someone is determined to kill themselves, they’ll find a way.  Even if you ban everything else that could possibly be used for someone to kill themselves with, eventually you’re left with the old “jump off a bridge”.  What are you going to do?  Ban gravity?

Suicide, like murder, is the result of a conscious decision being reached to take a life.  The only difference is whose life is being taken.  It’s also important to know that the mechanism would only change with the removal of firearms.  Instead of blaming the firearm, why to look for the causes for the high rate of depression among American teens?  I mean, that could actually be productive.

Instead, these doctors apparently would rather make a statement about the evils of guns.  What’s worth noting also is that the report cites that the death rate is 4 deaths per 100,000 people.  A whopping four people.  Now, if that were your child, that’s obviously far to high and I can sympathize with that.  But if you remove the suicides, that rate wouldn’t even be that high.

Guns aren’t the boogieman some try to make them out to be.  It’s a tool, one used to defend someone’s life an estimated 2.5 million times each year.  It’s not the root of all evil.  It’s the equalizer.  A 120 lbs woman isn’t nearly as likely to be able to take down a 215 lbs potential rapist with Tae Kwon Do as she is with a 9 mm Glock.  A 76 year old man in a wheelchair isn’t going to be able to run to a neighbor’s house when the local gangbangers decide his house look like fun, but he can use a 230 grain projectile out of the 1911 pistol he used in World War II.

Every time someone trots out the suicide rates to try and prove a point about guns, the world’s response needs to be “and your point is?”  They’ve proven nothing, other that kids kill themselves.  How many millions were spent on this study to determine that?  We already knew that.  What I want to see is for one of these eggheads to admit that the problem isn’t the gun, but the people using them for unintended purposes.

What do you figure the odds of that happening will be?