The Cause and Cure of Firearm Accidents among Children

Good evening.

My name is Ed Patrick and I represent the Maryland Citizens Defense League.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Truer words have never been spoken, yet there is a certain aspect to education that has escaped this committee and the governor.

As the father of three children ranging in age from toddler to teen, it amazed me how the first three words of each child seemed to be, Ma-ma, Da-da,...McDonalds.

One reason for this is the billion dollars spent on advertising by McDonalds each year. Another reason is that American kids watch too much television.

I dare say that even the governor knows the meaning of the word, Pokemon.

I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that if you do not spend dollars toward firearms education, then you are supporting the high costs of ignorance, by abandoning the children of Maryland to the relentless marketing influences of movies, television, and video games. These industries spend far more money marketing violence and death than McDonalds will ever spend promoting French fries.

So what is it that Hollywood is teaching our children about guns?

Take the situation comedy where a female employee finds a pistol and points it at all of her colleagues in the office while they duck behind their desks. Ha, ha. Very funny.

How about the gritty, in-your-face crime drama where a cop demonstrates to the camera that he knows enough about guns to keep his finger out of the trigger guard, but not enough to keep from sticking the muzzle against the temple of his brother and threatening to shoot.

Or maybe it’s a popular TV show about angels in which a Luger is made safe by removing the magazine but the weapon is never cleared. This show prompted my 12 year-old son to say, Dad, there’s a bullet still in the pistol. My son was already 30 minutes ahead of the script.

Hollywood believes this type of garbage programming is a money maker. While responsible gunowners cringe and change the channel, I suggest throwing the tube out the window.

Yes, Hollywood is teaching kids about guns, but no, they’re not doing a good job.

We have been told that you cannot gun proof a child, yet I’ve never heard anyone say that you cannot knife proof a child. While many emotional arguments have been presented about the dangers of guns in the home, why is it that we never hear about the cutting or stabbing deaths of children? While one might reason that a gun is the more lethal weapon, how is it that kitchen drawers and counters filled with knives are not being abused by kids? What is it about a gun in the back of a closet that makes it more fascinating than the carving knife on the kitchen counter?

I believe, as responsible gun owners do, that this is a learned behavior. Like bigotry and hatred, irresponsible and reckless behavior patterns must be learned. They are not carried in childrens genes.

Parents may not want to bring guns into their homes, but Hollywood brings reckless gun-slinging into the living room each and every day, where children, in turn, bring what they know onto the streets and into the schools. While only half of American households are armed with guns, almost all households are armed with television.

In answer to the gun education of Hollywood, the State of Maryland is doing nothing, except throw up its hands in the face of social ills to go after the evil gun. Unwilling to prosecute Dad because his pistol was improperly stored, legislators now want to make political hay by drafting laws that throw this same grieving father into a jail cell with rapists, drug dealers and murderers. Rather than fighting fire with fire and combating the lethal instructions kids are receiving every day, Governor Glendening prefers to tell the Assembly that he will dictate technology.

My question is, Why?

The standard argument is always put forth, If it saves just one life. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it would save 40,000 lives a year if the national speed limit was only 2 miles per hour. They are not just statistics, they are people, yet 40,000 is the number of them we sacrifice on the altar of transportation every year in order to have the freedom of movement that has made us the envy of the world.

The cost of ignorance is enormous, yet you represent a committee of political gentry, unanswerable to the voting public, that has been appointed to determine what mandated technology can be foisted upon us peasants to address your perception of the problem of child gun violence.

Strangely, gun crime – even in the schools – has been dropping for years. Murder and violence is down. Despite the fact that Marylanders were Americas most-robbed citizens in 95, 96, and 97, even Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend reported during the 98 election campaign that violent crime in Maryland fell at nearly twice the national average in the previous year.

With crime dropping continuously since 1993, why is there so much clamoring now for new legislation? A much more cost-effective solution for the taxpayers of Maryland would be to inoculate every Kindergartner in the state with these four phrases:

STOP!
DONT TOUCH!
LEAVE THE AREA!
TELL AN ADULT!

For this, and many other reasons, the doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and rocket scientists of the Maryland Citizens Defense League oppose this Orwellian mandate for smart gun technology.

Thank you.
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‘‘Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’’

— H. G. Wells