Excerpts

from Bob Herbert's recent op-ed in the New York Times, "Hooked on Violence" -- for those of you without TimesSelect:

I had coffee the other day with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the
Children’s Defense Fund, and she mentioned that since the murders of Robert
Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, well over a million
Americans have been killed by firearms in the United States. That’s more than
the combined U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in all of American
history.

“We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence,”
she said. “As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the
massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

[. . .]

Those who are interested in the safety and well-being of children should keep in mind that only motor vehicle accidents and cancer kill more children in the U.S. than firearms. A study released a few years ago by the Harvard School of Public Health compared firearm mortality rates among youngsters 5 to 14 years old in the five states with the highest rates of gun ownership with those in the five states with the lowest rates.

The results were chilling. Children in the states with the highest rates of gun ownership were 16 times as likely to die from an accidental gunshot wound, nearly seven times as likely to commit suicide with a gun, and more than three times as likely to be murdered with a firearm.

Only a lunatic could seriously believe that more guns in more homes is good for America’s children.