Rightwing blogs are filled with praise for the gun-owning mom who confronted Obama last week during his town hall discussion of gun control:

“As a survivor of rape, and now a mother to two small children — you know, it seems like being able to purchase a firearm of my choosing, and being able to carry that wherever my — me and my family are — it seems like my basic responsibility as a parent at this point,” she told Obama during “Guns in America,” CNN’s town hall, after the president announced executive orders on gun control Tuesday. “I have been unspeakably victimized once already, and I refuse to let that happen again to myself or my kids.”

Let’s meet two other parents who had guns in their homes to keep their children safe:

A woman in St. Cloud, Florida, woke up just before midnight Tuesday and fired a shot at a person she thought had broken into her home. But the person wasn’t an intruder; it was her 27-year-old daughter. The woman fired one round, but police didn’t say where the bullet hit the daughter. She died at a hospital.

A father mistook his 14-year-old son for an intruder and shot him in the neck, killing him, at a Cincinnati home on Tuesday morning, according to police. The father had dropped the boy off at the school bus stop, but the teen returned home…. The teen was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Shortly after 8:15 a.m., police said the boy had died.

The woman in St. Cloud shot and killed her daughter—home visiting for the holidays—on December 30. The dad in Cincinnati shot and killed his son yesterday. Take it away, MinnPost:

Having a gun in your home significantly increases your risk of death — and that of your spouse and children. And it doesn’t matter how the guns are stored or what type or how many guns you own. If you have a gun, everybody in your home is more likely than your non-gun-owning neighbors and their families to die in a gun-related accident, suicide or homicide.

Obama responded to the gun-owning mom at his town hall meeting with this:

Obama tried, at length, to answer her question. He pointed out that, though he didn’t think Corban’s guns necessarily made her safer, he’s not trying to take them away. “I just want to repeat that there’s nothing that we’ve proposed that would make it harder for you to purchase a firearm.” And: “You have to be pretty well trained in order to fire a weapon against somebody who is assaulting you and catches you by surprise.” And: “There’s always the possibility that that firearm in a home leads to a tragic accident.” And: “All I’m focused on is making sure that a terrible crime like yours that was committed is not made easier because somebody can go on the Internet and just buy whatever weapon they want without us finding out whether they’re a criminal or not.”

Corban told the Washington Post that she felt Obama dodged her question. I disagree. I think, like some gun owners (a minority), she’s dodging the facts. The most important fact she’s dodging: having a gun in the home doesn’t make her kids safer. It makes them less safe. Another fact she dodged: she doesn’t speak for a majority of gun owners or a majority of Republicans.

In addition to being a nationally syndicated sex advice columnist, the author of several books, and the host of the Savage Lovecast, Savage is “a deviant of the highest order” (Daily Caller)....

9 replies on “Guns Do Not Make Us Safer”

  1. Of course they’re dodging facts. It’s an emotional issue, for them – people are taking away their teddy bears. And their steel penises.

  2. I’m guessing I’ll get down-voted, but none of this changes the fact that the constitution guarantees the right to gun ownership. It’s not really up to the government to figure out if they make us safer.

  3. The 2nd amendment issue is sticky. I think it’s common sense for people to have to pass a gun safety course, not unlike a driving test, to cut down on carelessness and the lack of gun training that leads to accidents like parents shooting their own children. But at the same time, because it’s a constitutional right, unlike driving, you can’t put a roadblock like a gun safety course in between someone owning a firearm. The problem is lack of training. I’d wager pretty highly that these gun accidents are happening in metro areas, not in places where people grow up with firearms and learn to respect them. The right to defend yourself is a human right.

  4. This is all getting so tired. Obviously owning a gun makes you more likely to die (or kill) in a gun related incident, just as owning a car makes you more likely to die (or kill) in a car accident. But what doesn’t come up in these discussions is that the second amendment (as in number two behind FREE SPEECH) was created to allow citizens to arm themselves in the event that their govt becomes oppressive. It has nothing to do with hunting or collecting. And it certainly does nothing to encourage people to go cray cray and commit a mass shooting. Guns should be liscensed and registered to their owners just like cars, because both are potentially lethal. But I don’t see anyone voting to restrict how many or what type of cars you can own. Cars kill WAY more people than guns in this country, so what’s really going on here? Read your history folks.

  5. A lot of comments here that talk about the Constitution like it was some kind of holy book. This is the same document that allowed slavery, and didn’t allow women to vote, right? That’s the piece of paper that you seem to think is so much more important than all these school shootings, and kids dying?

  6. The people who talk about the Constitution like it was a holy book also seem to forget the second word of the phrase “Second Amendment”. As in, it wasn’t even in the original constitution. If we need another amendment to repeal it and ban guns, then let’s get on with doing that.

  7. Own all the guns that are built with 16th century technology you want. Keep that in the constitution. And remember it’s all in the context of a WELL REGULATED militia, not an individual with a desire to collect or use guns for any other reason whatsoever – individual self-defense included.

    Anything that is built with modern technology, however, and heck – I’ll generously round up to the nearest century on this one, so current to technology available in 1800 – should be restricted proportionately to its capability for destruction of human life. Which is the only thing guns are designed to do, kill living things. That’s it. And I think we’ve had seriously more than enough examples of what those tools are capable of.

  8. All anti gun Americans who won’t stop till we’ve put them all in a burn pile to make the world safer. Do everyone a favor, organize a church, make some signs and start protesting in front of gun stores and shows so you can look like all those anti planned parenthood folks. Then get on your ten speed and go fight to melt all the cars down while you’re at it you’d probably have a better chance. As a democrat it amazes me how close minded this argument has become and that the same behavior we chastise right wing evangelicals for (as we should) is the same behavior we’re adopting for gun control. I support Obama’s bg check executive order but I will never support this my way or the highway attitude on anything political reasonable solutions are way more sound.

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