The Purpose of My Reply...

Wow! There is so much here to take issue with. Unfortunately I don't write for a living so I don't have countless hours to continue to do research and write on this. I want to address a few things you said specifically and then I have to move on.

I am not, nor was I ever trying to compare specifically, as I said before, the issues of childhood gun deaths and injuries vs. childhood drowning deaths and injuries. I used that specific statistic to make a broader point that applies to all of life for everyone, whether they are a gun owner or not. It is the fact that personally responsibility is the only thing that will prevent tragedies, and even with personal responsibility, tragedies happen... even for non-gun owning families. Life happens, and when we decide as a people to restrict freedom for safety, we have given up the only thing that matters. I could have used the statistics for many other types of childhood injury or death which actually are higher and more closely mirror the age dynamic of firearms deaths for children, but my point was never direct comparison. My point was that no matter what you do... ban guns, swimming pools, anything built higher than 4ft above ground level (as last I checked more children are injured or die in falls than by guns), ban everything you can think of that kills children and children will still die due to tragedy.

Again, I risk sounding callous in writing this, but I believe that personal liberty is more important to our society than any notion of "public safety." For without personal liberty, there is no freedom, and without freedom, who the hell wants to be alive anyway? I would recommend that anyone who is more concerned with preventing the so-called "needless deaths" within the United States pack up their belongings and move to Europe. For instance, in the United Kingdom, they are so concerned with preventing "needless deaths" that they have already outlawed guns, any form of self-defense whatsoever, even if someone is trying to kill you, and they are well on the way to banning knives as well. Don't ruin my country, move to somewhere that they have already given up on their personal freedom for the false pretense of safety.

You stated that I think "unless such things achieve a complete solution then they are a waste of time." While you are partially correct, I do need to correct you on one thing: Any of those kinds of laws are not only a waste of time, but a surrender of liberty for the sake of some people's peace of mind. I am not willing to accept that. Peace of mind will not keep me safe from some piece of crap gangster or junkie who wants to impress his ghetto friends or score another hit of smack from killing me when I won't give him what he wants. In this world, as long as there is evil, I will use the most effective means of keeping that evil from hurting myself or my family. These useless social pariah will never give up the tools that they use to take advantage of good honest people, and therefore I will not give up mine. Not to mention gun bans only make things worse, see: United Kingdom and Australia.

That is really all of the time that I have to address this issue. Maybe this time you can see my actual point instead of fixating on the numbers.

P.S. The numbers do show that gun deaths and injuries of children is at an all time low and is in the BOTTOM 5 things that injure or kill our children.