This Is America: Hundreds of Children Killed Every Year Due to Easy Access to Guns

One day after the bloodbath at an Oregon college where 10 people were killed, an 11-year-old killed his brother. And what’s more, the day after that, some other 11-year-old shot his friend because she did not let him play with her dog.

Those child-perpetrated crimes were not mentioned in newspapers’ headlines or on TV news, but one has to conclude that this is exactly what happens in the U.S. every day — [these events] are a commonplace occurrence, unlike the bloodbaths that happen once every few months.

Every year hundreds of American children are dying in a ridiculous way — because their parents or friends had a gun and were not able to secure it. Of course, in a country where there are 300 million guns in private hands, such accidents are unavoidable. But they don’t have any impact on the content state of mind of Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican candidate for president, who in a YouTube video plugs bacon fried on a machine gun’s barrel.

An 11-Year-Old Shoots an 8-Year-Old

The first 11-year-old killed [someone] accidentally, during an outdoor picnic where adults showed guns to each other and discussed them. The boy took one of the three guns lying on the table and fired. Unluckily, the bullet hit the head of his 12-year-old brother, who died immediately.

It happened in Moore, South Carolina. The police called what happened ”an unfortunate accident,” although outside the U.S. the adults would have been accused of endangering the lives of these children (i.e. of carelessly leaving a loaded gun within their reach).

The second 11-year-old killed with premeditation. An 8-year-old neighbor did not let him play with her puppy, which she had not owned long. Sheriff Bud McCoif, from Jefferson County in the State of Tennessee, told Washington Post journalists that the offended boy went home and took his father’s gun out from the wardrobe. He aimed at the neighbor from the window. When the ambulance arrived the girl was lying [on the ground], having been shoot through the chest. She died immediately after being taken to a hospital.

The boy was accused of murder and is being kept in a youth detention center for minors. In the meantime, his stupid father remains unpunished (which proves the stupidity of the police, the courts or the law — delete as appropriate).

Clinton Against the Gun Lobby

Will America’s grotesque, nightmarish love of arms ever end? After Thursday’s massacre at Umpqua College in the state of Oregon, where 26-year-old Christopher Harper-Mercer, armed with six guns and rifles, shot nine people and afterward himself, presidential candidate Hilary Clinton dared to challenge the National Rifle Association, an organization that protects arms sellers and gun owners.

“What is wrong with us that we can’t stand up to the NRA and the gun lobby?” she asked during an election rally. “We don’t just need to pray for people, we need to act. We need to build a movement … Republicans keep refusing to do anything to protect our communities. They put the NRA ahead of American families. It is wrong and we need to make every politician who sides with them look into the eyes of parents whose children have been murdered and explain why they listen to the gun lobbyists instead.”

On the other hand, after the Oregon shooting Republicans were mostly saying that the problem is not guns, but rather the mentally ill, whom the country is not able to diagnose or isolate. This is repeated like a mantra after each massacre, although it is complete rubbish; most of the gun-related killings in the U.S. are being committed by sane people (from a strictly medical point of view, not in a colloquial sense).

For years, President Barack Obama has called for restrictions on accessing weapons, including police checks on people who buy guns at arms fairs and from private sellers (currently only those buying guns in shops are being checked). But this is also just fantasy — even if Obama’s demands were listened to, they would not solve the problem. Most of the massacres in recent years were committed with the use of legally bought arms.

Annul the Second Amendment

It’s very simple: Americans own 300 million weapons, and therefore massacres, murders and accidental child killings, or children killing other children, will happen. Sen. Cruz, who fried bacon on the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle, is either an idiot if he does not understand that, or a cynic (more likely the second).

The only solution would be to take guns away from the citizens — but this is not possible for two reasons. Firstly, it would be an exceptionally complicated logistical operation. Secondly, and even more important, the Second Amendment in the Constitution allows Americans to freely buy and own a gun.

Truly, one should start with the Amendment — it was adopted at the end of the 18th century, when firearms were completely different than those of today; for example, one could shoot only once, after which it was necessary to reload a gun or a rifle, which took some time, in order to be able to shoot again. And the political conditions were different — American revolutionaries thought that the gun would protect citizens from a dictatorship (which nowadays, when dictators have tanks and airplanes, is no longer relevant).

But so far none of the important American politicians has had the courage to loudly say that the Second Amendment needs to be annulled. Therefore, children will still be absurdly killed and kill themselves, and Sen. Cruz and people him like will still be joyfully frying beacon on the rifle barrels.