Ohio Shooting: Three Teens Now Dead. A Few Facts On Guns.

Yesterday’s tragic shooting at a Chardon, Ohio high school left one teen dead at the scene. Now, reports have come that a second and a third teen are dead, including one who was pronounced brain dead earlier today.

The students who have now passed away are Daniel Parmertor, Demetrius Hewlin, and Russell King Jr., the student who earlier was pronounced brain dead.

Reports state that the accused shooter, T.J. Lane, 17, came from a “violent” home. This examination, while irresponsible in the conclusions and assumptions it draws, provides more information about the relationships of the students.

This may not be the time to pass judgment or to politicize this event, as we do not yet know the condition of the two remaining teens who were injured by a fellow classmate. One classmate who knew the shooter and the victims had said yesterday the victims were targeted. Hopefully we’ll be able to learn more soon and learn from this.

Then again, I cannot imagine that the parents of those children would be upset that people were trying to ensure this never happens again.

The one lesson that does not nor ever will come from this is what the right has been saying all along: If there were more guns in schools, this couldn’t have happened.

That, in fact, is a lie.

In America, 100,000 people are shot with a gun every year. And sadly, many are children. And, sadly, like these three teens, in a high school cafeteria, early one winter’s morning, a great many die.

More guns are not the answer. More guns are the problem.

So are trying to put guns in kindergarten classes.

A few fact courtesy of the Brady Campaign:

DID YOU KNOW? In one year on average, almost 100,000 people in America are shot or killed with a gun.

• In one year, 31,593 people died from gun violence and 66,769 people survived gun injuries(National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC)). That includes:
  • 12,179 people murdered and 44,466 people shot in an attack (NCIPC).
  • 18,223 people who killed themselves and 3,031 people who survived a suicide attempt with a gun (NCIPC).
  • 592 people who were killed unintentionally and 18,610 who were shot unintentionally but survived (NCIPC).
• Over a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated (Childrens’ Defense Fund, p. 20).
• U.S. homicide rates are 6.9 times higher than rates in 22 other populous high-income countries combined, despite similar non-lethal crime and violence rates. The firearm homicide rate in the U.S. is 19.5 times higher (Richardson, p.1).
• Among 23 populous, high-income countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occurred in the United States (Richardson, p. 1).

• Gun violence impacts society in countless ways: medical costs, costs of the criminal justice system, security precautions such as metal detectors, and reductions in quality of life because of fear of gun violence. These impacts are estimated to cost U.S. citizens $100 billion annually (Cook, 2000).

DID YOU KNOW? Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths.

• An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present (Wiebe, p. 780).

• Higher household gun ownership correlates with higher rates of homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings (Harvard Injury Control Center).

• Keeping a firearm in the home increases the risk of suicide by a factor of 3 to 5 and increases the risk of suicide with a firearm by a factor of 17 (Kellermann, 1992, p. 467; Wiebe, p. 771).

• Keeping a firearm in the home increases the risk of homicide by a factor of 3 (Kellermann, 1993, p. 1084).

DID YOU KNOW? On the whole, guns are more likely to raise the risk of injury than to confer protection.

• A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a completed or attempted suicide(11x), criminal assault or homicide (7x), or unintentional shooting death or injury (4x) than to be used in a self-defense shooting. (Kellermann, 1998, p. 263).

• Guns are used to intimidate and threaten 4 to 6 times more often than they are used to thwart crime (Hemenway, p. 269).

• Every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens (FBI, Expanded Homicide Data, Table 15) compared with over 30,000 gun deaths (NCIPC).

• A 2009 study found that people in possession of a gun are 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault (Branas).

See also this list of attacks related to secondary schools.

And then there is this list, via Wikipedia: