Guns don't kill people, people do. NRA Slogan
Guns don't kill people, loss of blood and damaged internal organs kill people.
Guns don't kill people, kids with guns kill people.
Guns don't die, people do.

In the last two years seven back to back shootings by children in schools in Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Oregon; Littleton, Colorado; and Conyers, Georgia have left 30 dead and 74 wounded.
5,000 American minors are shot to death annually, most without stirring national attention.
More teenagers die of gunshot wounds than  of all natural diseases combined.  Center for Disease Control and Prevention
A week after the Johnsboro shootings, a four year old took a loaded 9 mm pistol to a day care center in Cleveland... twice in 2 months.
Forty percent of the accidental handgun shootings of children under 16 occur in the homes of friends or relatives of the child.  Am. Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology
For every child killed by a handgun, four are wounded.  Journal of the Am. Medical Association, 1995
"Even in a sportsman state state like Oklahoma people believe there are few if any circumstances when children should have unrestricted access to weapons."  Gov. F. Keating NYT 5/23/99
"Every day we don't have a shooting I feel quite relieved.  Access to guns is a critical variable in this situation. You can't kill or wound 14 people with a knife."  Kevin Dwyer, President-elect of the National Association of School Psychologists, quoted in Washington Post, 4/21/99
"This is like Toys"R"Us to them." M. Bernstein, gun shop owner in Colorado after some kids in trench coats recently came into his store and asked for guns. Quoted in M. Down 4/29/99
"Kids 13 and under Free"  Central Calif. Coast Gun Show.  Almost all gun shows allow kids to attend free of charge, many also allow women to attend free.
"As to whether school massacres like the tragedy in Littleton, Colo., arise from easy access to guns or from the influence of a violent media, we need only to remember the extreme violence of media and computer games in Japan and Hong Kong and the low incidence of random violence in these places. " Josh Pilzer NYT Letters 4/24/99
"This isn't about the right to have a gun.  This is about the right of every child not to fear for their life after they take a step into school to learn."  Dr. J. Alpert, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics calling for a ban on handguns and assault weapons.
"Kids are not suppose to kill kids. Schools are suppose to be safe zones, not killing fields." Pastor Bill Oudemolen, Foothills Baptist Church, Littleton, Colorado NYT 4/24/99
"We don't know what drove the two Colorado teens, but we do know that in no other country has anything like this school yard bloodshed happen so often.  It is time we looked at what sets us apart and whether we are harboring risk factors that we must address before tragedy strikes again.  To start, no other country in the industrialized world tolerates such easy access to guns."  T. B. Brazelton, Prof. Harvard Medical School, Cols. Dispatch 5/8/99
"There's a way to help insure that new faces and pocketbooks will continue to patronize your business:  Use the schools.  This is where most of your potential down-the line shooters and hunters now are....  Schools are an opportunity.  Grasp it."  National Shooting Sports Foundation publication.
"How old is old enough?  When your youngster wants a gun.  Age is not the major yardstick.  Some youngsters are ready to start at 10, others at 14."  National Shooting Sports Foundation pamphlet quoted by B. Herbert NYT 5/2/99
"If there had been even one armed guard in the school he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly."  NRA President Charleton Heston on ABC the day after the shootings; later reports noted there was an armed guard at the school.
"The 1994 Gun-Free School Zone bill was Utopian nonsense.  It virtually invited criminal attention, on a par with signs saying 'No Guns in This House.'  So will parents and school districts get real?  Or continue to await elimination of all so-called root causes?  That's a pretty long-run project....  But the erosion of moral standards puts an even bigger premium on armed force to repel murderers and protect kids.  A nation unwilling to use an effective and cheap tool well-suited to the job at hand because of ideology and irrational emotion is a nation of cowards and fools."  Morgan Reynolds, Director of Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis.
"The violence must be cured at its source, in the nuttiness of the gunnies, not their guns.... The proof is that other societies have all the factors in play here -- except for the gun culture.  .... Mixed up teens are everywhere, but they do not mow down their peers.  If we are going to wait until all psychological problems go away before we address the connection between the scale of violence and the firepower available to disturbed people, we may as well jettison any hope of protecting our children.  In that case, gun nuttiness will have won."  Gary Wills, Cols. Dispatch 4/27/99

In the wake of at least a half-dozen multiple-victim school shootings in the past 18 months, some SWAT units have changed their planning.  For these agencies, the student with a arsenal is now considered a more likely threat than an outside terrorist.  "We've got blueprints now of every school in this county, which we keep inside the SWAT vehicles," said Maj. Steve Ijames, who heads a SWAT unit for the Springfield, Mo. Police department.  "We're preparing for this very thing to happen... and when it does happen, we are ready."  NYT 4/28/99
"We're in serious trouble when the student body of one American school sustains greater casualties than NATO soldiers in the Balkans."  E. Zames, Letters Newsweek 5/24/99
"I am a teenager.  This affects  me more deeply than any adult could even begin to comprehend."  Junior from Jefferson County Colo. Open School
A student was sent to the police station for wearing black clothing; another was questioned for carrying a chemistry book; in Michigan police blew up a suspicious object that turned out to be a student art project.
Many schools have or are considering locks and buzzers on all doors, surveillance cameras, removing student lockers, metal detectors, requiring mesh or see through book bags -- and some are even considering buying two sets of books, one for home and one for school.  NYT 5/24/99
"What kind of country do we live in if our kids have to go through metal detectors?"  M. Lilly, Conyers, Ga, in NYT 5/22/99
"The N.R.A. is working to advert Columbine High School type disasters by offering training in the responsible use of firearms.  Of course such training cuts down on accidents by teaching people how to handle and store firearms safely.  Surely many lives have been saved by such training, but it will not prevent the premeditated misuse of firearms by people intending to kill.  All that firearms training will do in such instances is increase the likelihood the shooters will hit their targets more accurately."  S. Breidbart, NYT Letters 5/4/99
NRA Eddie Eagle Gun Safety program was created in 1988 and has "reached more than 10 million children with its simple safety message of 'STOP! Don't touch. Leave the area.  Tell an adult,' when they come across a firearm in an unsupervised situation"  NRA Grassfire Webpage 4/2/98 [Not if but when, and its ok if they come across a gun in a supervised area?]
In the first study we brought a police officer to a class of 60 children, and he told them: 'Don't touch guns -- they're dangerous.  If you see a gun, leave the area.  Go tell an adult.'  The children 'learned' the lesson; they could tell you what they would do if they saw a gun.  But when we left them alone with disarmed guns, they picked them up and shot everything in sight.  So in the second study, we taught a different group of children for five days how to make good choices, how to resist peer pressure, how to distinguish toys from dangerous objects.  But the results were similar:  across the two studies 65 percent of the children played with guns.  They even tried to use crayons as bullets."  M. Hardy NYT 5/14/99

Nearly 90 percent of all homicides among boys aged 15 to 19 are firearm-related; 80% of the victims are boys.
For every gun death there are an estimated five to seven gun injuries; the annual cost of intentional and unintentional gun injuries was estimated to be over $14 billion in 1993; assaults with guns are five times as likely to result in death as knife assaults.
"The Columbine massacre was the sixth multiple-victim school shooting in the past 18 months.  If there are common threads it is that each involved firearms, undiagnosed mental illness and long-standing grievances on the part of the gunman. "Any one of these three risks separately does not produce a violent event.  It's their convergence and interaction that produces an event.'"  Dr. Fagan, Columbia Univ. quoted in NYT
"Guns transform what is wide-spread teenage behavior into disasters."  Dr. A. Blumstein, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
In most years more gun deaths were attributable to suicides than homicides.
More than 1.5 million Americans under the age 15 are seriously depressed.  National Institute of Mental Health
"Ample research indicates that the presence of guns has had a profound effect on youthful suicides.  This fact takes on particular and alarming significance with the realization that the adolescent suicide rate tripled from the 1950's to the 1980's, whereas that or all ages increased only slightly.  As of 1992, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among older teenagers, and the third-leading cause among children as a whole. Nationwide the presence of a loaded handgun in the house is the most potent risk factor for successful suicide among children.  A study of adolescent suicide in Chicago found, for example, that children of law enforcement officers accounted for an unusually large number of adolescent suicides.  This finding is striking because nearly all the law enforcement officers kept guns in the house and were carefully trained about the use, care, and dangers of weapons in the home.... The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the odds of a suicide prone adolescents actually succeeding increase seventy-five times when guns are present in the home."  Spitzer p. 73

"In addition to why, lets ask how do these murders happen?  Disenfranchised young people who snap are able to injure and kill many people because they have access to weapons....  The NRA and others would have us believe that the answer is always to bring more guns.  We have more guns than any country in the world not at war and we are the least safe.  More people were killed by firearms in a few hours at Columbine High School than were killed in Great Britain last year.  Don't give kids the message that what we need to solve our problems is more firepower."  K. Leaman-Miller, Denver in Letters Cols. Dispatch 5/14/99
"Despite our prayers that it will not happen again, the past suggests it likely will.  When it does, the asking of "Why?" will be a ritual.  The only questions with fresh answers will be "Where?" and "How many?"  Mike Harden, Columbus Dispatch 5/2/99

"Do you still hear raging guns, ending dreams of precious ones...
Columbine, rose blood-red, heartbreak overflows my head...
Columbine, friend of mine, peace will come in time...."
Jonathan Cohen, junior at Columbine High School, singing  eyes closed, in a clear tenor, at the memorial service at Columbine attended by 70,000, double the population of the suburban neighborhood.