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Guns—A Way of DeathAwake!—1990 | May 22
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Parents who own guns must bear the responsibility for their children who use them to take their own lives or the lives of others. “The rise in suicides by young people in 1988,” wrote one newspaper, “can be linked in part to easier access to guns as more homeowners stockpile weapons to protect their residences, police said. . . . If you have a weapon in the house, there’s just a chance a kid is going to get to it someday.”
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Guns—A Way of DeathAwake!—1990 | May 22
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Parents may comfort themselves that their guns are concealed where their children or others cannot find them. Unfortunately, however, dead children have proved their parents wrong. Also, consider the obvious. “Well, you can’t have it two ways,” said one police chief. “If you really safeguard your gun so that innocent people in your house, your children or visitors or someone else, can’t get hurt with it, then [you] won’t be able to get to that gun for the kind of emergency that [you] bought it for in the first place.”
Police estimate that if a household gun is ever used, “it is six times as likely to be fired at a member of the family or a friend as at an intruder,” reported Time magazine. “A wife or mother thinks she hears a burglar and ends up shooting a husband or son coming home late,” said one public-safety commissioner. ‘How, then, should people protect their homes?’ he was asked. “Perhaps the best way to protect yourself is by risking your property rather than your life. Most robbers and burglars are there to steal, not to kill. Most firearms deaths in homes are committed with the homeowner’s gun.
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