On December 30, 2014, in Hayden, Idaho a two year old shot and killed his mother. The woman was shopping at Wal-Mart, with the boy and her purse in the shopping cart. She had a license for a concealed handgun, and the gun was in her purse in a special zippered pouch for a concealed weapon. Her son reached into the purse, and the gun fired, killing the woman. Presumably they boy was playing, and just thought it was a toy, or maybe it was a tragic accident and the child inadvertently hit or squeezed the trigger. The news story is not clear on the details. [Here's the Story from Fox News.] But .... According to a favorite gun advocate slogan, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." The idea behind the slogan is that every shooting is intentional, and if someone is intent on killing they will do it with whatever tool is available. The slogan strongly implies that every killing is intentional, and if a gun is not available the killer will use something else. So, according to this theory, if that toddler in Idaho hadn't used a gun he would have killed his mother with something else. Perhaps he would have toddled to the auto supply section and grab a tire iron to bash in his mother's brains. But clearly that idea is as absurd as it is sick. The child obviously had no intent to kill his mother (and will undoubtedly be traumatized by it for the rest of his life). Had the gun not been in his mother's purse he may have played with her car keys or cell phone, and she would be alive today. So clearly it was the gun that killed the woman. The gun killed the woman, the child didn't kill the woman. Every year roughly 30,000 Americans are killed by guns. (See, http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states) Of that, roughly 10,000 are murdered, 19,000 commit suicide, and between 500 and 1,000 are killed accidentally. [The Wikipedia Entry for Gun Violence in the United States has a good overview of these numbers.] In 2011, the last year for which data is available, 32,163 people were killed by guns. Of that 19,766 committed suicide, 11,101 were murdered, and 851 were killed by accidental discharge of a firearm. [The CDC Data is here, in Table 2] There is no way to know about the 10,000 murders, and it is likely that if the murderer did not have a gun he would have used something else. (I say "he" because men commit 95% of all homicides. I apologize to the female murderers out there for my sexist language.) But it is worth noting that there were 4,852 murders by other means in the United States in 2011, so some would have been committed by other means. But just as clearly it is not true of those 500 to 1000 "accidental" gun deaths. The two year old in Hayden Idaho had no intent to kill his mother, nor did the three year old in Arizona who shot is 18 month old brother, or the three year old in Oklahoma who killed his mother. Just Google "toddler shoots ...." parent or sibling, and you'll get dozens of hits of small children inadvertently killing a family member. (It's really disconcerting.) There is no way to know what percentage of the roughly 500 to 1000 accidental deaths each year are kids killing a parent, but clearly it happens with some frequency. Other leading causes of "accidental" gun deaths are people cleaning guns, and showing off with guns. But in every one of those accidental cases there was no intent to kill. That means that between 5% and 10% of all non-suicide gun deaths each year are accidental, with no intent to kill. And this means that in 5% to 10% of all non-suicide gun deaths each year it was the gun, and not the person that did the killing. So guns do kill people, even when the person pulling the trigger had no intent to harm anyone. The NRA and gun rights advocates may not care about logic, and they certainly don't care about the roughly 1000 people killed accidentally by guns each year. They believe that their rights, or rather their warped idea about those rights, are more important than the lives of a thousand people a year. Those people are merely collateral damage, statistical blips, background noise lost in the chatter of silly slogans.