This is an outright lie. Children who are taught gun safety, responsibility and a working knowledge of firearms can save not only their parents' lives, but their own. Also, in South Carolina, children ARE LEGALLY ALLOWED to handle guns under the supervision of an adult.

This is an outright lie. Every state has strict federal and state guidelines that must be followed to secure weaponry. It is the most regulated industry in the United States.

Lie. Gun buyback programs do not work. The guns that are turned in are most often inoperable or outdated, and are not the types of guns used in crimes.

The Harvard University Gazette (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/09.28/firearms.html) reported: "The Medical College of Wisconsin, which works closely with NEISS, identified 5 specific gun makes that accounted for almost 50% the fatalities in the Milwaukee area. However, these makes accounted for only 6% of the guns turned in during a buyback program, raising questions about the effectiveness of buybacks in disposing of the most lethal guns."

This is incomplete information. 46 states today allow conceal carry, up from 22 in the last 10 years. State legislatures would not pass pro-gun concealed carry laws if anti-gun laws worked to reduce crime!

Skewed information. We are at the lowest point in gun accidents and deaths, equivalent to the 1960s.

Boston's Gun Bible (http://javelinpress.com/bostons_gun_bible.html) recommends that you "gun-proof your child, not child-proof your gun." The NRA offers the Eddie Eagle program to teach children gun safety (http://nrahq.org/safety/eddie/). And Greg Perry, in "This Advice Might Save Your Life" (http://lewrockwell.com/perry/perry11.html), explains further: "The Clinton Administration's Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, said that toy guns are dangerous. I tend to agree. They teach children bad habits that can kill them (or someone else) later. You need to respect her advice and keep the toy guns out of their hands! Buy your children real guns instead. Teach them how to handle their weapons safely and accurately. They will know from the beginning that guns are not toys but are weapons to be respected and mastered."

But that's not the story told by Dr. Arthur Kellermann, director of Emory University's Center for Injury Control and the CDC's favorite gun researcher. In a 1988 New England Journal of Medicine article, Kellermann and his co-authors cite Wright and Rossi's book Under the Gun to support the notion that "restricting access to handguns could substantially reduce our annual rate of homicide." What they actually said was: "There is no persuasive evidence that supports this view." In a 1992 New England Journal of Medicine article, Kellermann cites an American Journal of Psychiatry study (http://appi.org/ajp/) to back up the claim "that limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides." But the study actually found just the opposite -- i.e., that people who don't have guns find other ways to kill themselves. Even without access to secret data, it's clear that many of Kellermann's inferences are not justified.

Public Health Pot Shots By Don B. Kates, Henry E. Schaffer, and William B. Waters IV (http://reason.com/9704/fe.cdc.shtml)

Consider the facts in "Impact of Gun Control Laws Questioned" by Kristen Wyatt (excerpt):

(http://intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/333/7228/369975.html): "A sweeping federal review of the nation's gun control laws -- including mandatory waiting periods and bans on certain weapons -- found no proof such measures reduce firearm violence. The review was conducted by a task force of scientists appointed by the CDC ... the task force reviewed 51 published studies about the effectiveness of eight types of gun-control laws. The laws included bans on specific firearms or ammunition, measures barring felons from buying guns, and mandatory waiting periods and firearm registration. None of the studies were done by the federal government. In every case, a CDC task force found 'insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness'."

Information for this figure was supplied by the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence Statistics (NRA blacklist Group).

(refuted fully in this report)

Consider the facts in "Public Health Pot Shots" by Kates, Schaffer and Waters (excerpt):

(http://reason.com/9704/fe.cdc.shtml) "The CDC suggested just that in a 1989 report to Congress, where it asserted that "[s]ince the early 1970s the year-to-year fluctuations in firearm availability has paralleled the numbers of homicides." But this correlation was a fabrication: While the number of handguns rose 69% from 1974-1988, handgun murders actually dropped by 27%. Moreover, as U.S. handgun ownership more than doubled from the early 1970s through the 1990s, homicides held constant or declined for every major population group except young urban black men. The CDC can blame the homicide surge in this group on guns only by ignoring a crucial point: Gun ownership is far less common among urban blacks than among whites or rural blacks."

Gun ownership in the U.S. is at an all-time high, with an estimated 222 million civilian firearms -- and the violent crime rate has not risen with the proliferation of weapons! Consider the facts in "Public Health Pot Shots" by Kates, Schaffer and Waters (excerpt):

(http://reason.com/9704/fe.cdc.shtml): "The CDC's reports and studies never give long-term trend data linking gun sales to murder rates, citing only carefully-selected partial or short-term correlation. If murder went down in the first and second years, then back up in the third and fourth years, only the rise is mentioned. CDC publications focus on fluctuations and other unrepresentative phenomena to exaggerate the incidence of gun deaths and to conceal declines. Thus, in its "Advance Data from Vital and Health Statistics" (1994), the CDC melodramatically announces that gun deaths now "rival" driving fatalities, as if gun murders were increasing. But this trend simply reflects the fact that driving fatalities are declining more rapidly than murders. While the CDC shows a selective interest in homicide trends, it tends to ignore trends in accidental gun deaths -- with good reason. In the 25 years from 1968-1992, American gun ownership increased almost 135% (from 97 million to 222 million), with handgun ownership rising more than 300%. These huge increases coincided with a 2/3 decline in accidental gun fatalities. The CDC and the researchers it funds do not like to talk about this dramatic development, since it flies in the face of the assumption that more guns mean more deaths. They are especially reluctant to acknowledge the drop in accidental gun deaths because of the two most plausible explanations for it: the replacement of rifles and shotguns with the much safer handgun as the main weapon kept loaded for self-defense, and the NRA's impressive efforts in gun safety training."

Other South Carolina counties (and nationwide) use an even more insidious "health" book, "MeeksHeit Health and Wellness" (glencoe.com/sec/meeksheit). I wrote a full analysis of the anti-gun bias in this series (http://publicrights.org/MeeksHeit/weaponsecanalysis.html). "MeeksHeit" is touted as the most-used nation- and world-wide health book, and other health book writers follow its lead.