“Lock them up. There are things that you can do,” a Houston assistant police chief said last week after a 3-year-old boy fatally shot his 8-month-old baby brother in the
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America is certainly an exceptional country when it comes to firearms. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But the relationship is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most homicidal in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms.
These maps and charts show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.
Credit.George Frey/Agence France-Presse Getty Images
“Lock them up. There are things that you can do,” a Houston assistant police chief said last week after a 3-year-old boy fatally shot his 8-month-old baby brother in the family home.
The assistant chief was talking about guns, not the 3-year-old. Obviously. Although in some parts of the country, the idea of putting kids in prison seems to elicit more enthusiasm than the idea of locking away the weapons.
This kind of disaster happens way, way, way too much. Last year at least 371 children stumbled across a loaded gun and fired, causing 143 deaths and 243 injuries. In one case, a 3-year-old shot himself to death with a pistol that had fallen out of the pocket of a member of his family apparently while the adults were playing cards.
Eight years ago, Mark Barden stood in the White House Rose Garden to make a plea for action on gun violence.
That day, the U.S. Senate had rejected a proposal to expand background checks for firearm purchases. Four months earlier, Barden had lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
âWe return home with the determination that change will happen â maybe not today, but it will happen,â Barden said at the 2013 news conference, flanked by his family, then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Today, Barden still is fighting that fight.
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