XUNICEF News and Views

Click here for the Matthew Yim  article: Summary Using 2023 CDC data, the article confirms that firearms were the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 17 in the U.S. for the fourth consecutive year.

On Monday, a 28 year old woman who had attended a school run by the Presbyterian Church returned to the school.  She shot her way through a locked door of the school and then shot and killed three children, aged 9, and 3 adult staff, including the headmistress of the school, before she herself was killed by police responding to emergency calls. The shooter was heavily armed with 7 guns which she had legally purchased.  She was under treatment at the time for emotional issues and depression.  The statistics are shocking, and yet it seems that no matter how shocking the numbers may be, they remain insufficient to overcome the love many Americans feel for their guns and recent interpretations by US courts that the right to own guns is embedded in the US Constitution.   According to the Washington Post there have been 376 school shootings in the US since 1999 when the infamous Columbine School shooting took place.  According to NPR in 2023 alone 74 people have...

What a sick society - it deserves to implode: Lou A JR-15 model in January 2022. Photo: C4 Defense/YouTube At a gun expo in Las Vegas last January, Eric Schmid, the founder of WEE1 Tactical, demonstrated his company’s first offering: the JR-15, a play on the popular AR-15 assault rifle designed to look just like its deadly cousin, but 20 percent smaller. “It fits the kids really well,” he told a visitor to his booth. “That’ll give them the confidence to hold this thing the way they should have confidence holding it — no drop down in the front trying to manage a weight that’s not right for them. It just fits ’em, fits ’em really well.” Long guns for kids have been around for years, typically shotguns or single-shot rifles scaled down for a child. But what has attracted so much attention to the JR-15 is its semiautomatic action, firing with each pull of the trigger — along with the image of putting a mini assault rifle in the hands of children in a country where a 6-year-old just sho...

Taos, New Mexico, USAFollowing recent school shootings in Florida and elsewhere in the US, the XUNICEF network carried on a lively discussion of what UNICEF and what we retirees could do. We asked Paula Claycomb, former Chief of UNICEF’s Landmines and Small Arms Section to comment. You can contact Paula at paula.claycomb@gmail.com. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” That was the response by the first person I invited to a meeting of Moms Demand Action, a US grassroots NGO that works in all 50 states to reduce gun violence. I joined MOMS, as it is called, after a school shooting in Florida on Valentine’s Day, February 14, left 17 high school students dead and another 17 people wounded. Before that senseless massacre in Parkland, seven school shootings had taken place in the US in 2018 alone. Since that day, another 14 schools have had shootings, making a total of 22 school shootings so far this year. This does not include the many thousands of deaths due to domestic violence...