A toddler has shot themselves or another person every week in the U.S. for the past two years

Guns don’t kill people, toddlers do. It’s the only rational explanation if you look at the statistics for the past few years, where toddlers have shot themselves or another person once every week.

What can we possibly do about this? Gun safety laws? No way. We don’t want to do that. Responsible gun owners don’t need to be told how to store their guns, at least according to the NRA. In a press release responding to one town’s efforts to get safe gun storage laws in place, the organization wrote, “Everyone knows that firearms must be stored safety, particularly when housed with children, but it is NOT the Board’s business or role to dictate how people store things in their homes.”

Exactly. EVERYONE knows guns need to be stored safely! Just like everyone knows that seat belts keep you safe. Why bother with laws legislating that? Also, EVERYONE knows murdering is wrong! Why have laws? Murderers are still going to murder. There’s no point prosecuting fine, upstanding citizens who leave their guns unlocked and loaded in reach of their toddlers, making them murderers before they can even recite the alphabet. Ooopsy! Why punish a “responsible” gun owner for making a tragic “mistake?” There’s no way we can stop these things. Accidents happen.

Only, yes — there is totally a way we can stop these things from happening. By making safe storage laws mandatory in every state, and prosecuting those who are responsible for the deaths of others when these “accidents” happen. And I’m not talking about toddlers.

Yes, that was satire. But it highlights an epidemic that is not funny at all. “This PSA is satire,” Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign told The Washington Post. “But the public health crisis it calls attention to is anything but. Whether the trigger is pulled by a toddler, a convicted felon, domestic abuser, or terrorist, we have a problem in America with guns too easily falling into the wrong hands. And that translates to hundreds of lives lost or changed forever every single day.”

Fewer than 20 states have enacted laws to hold adults criminally liable if they fail to store guns safely and children access them and cause harm to themselves or others. Why?

Our kids are dying because our Congress refuses to make any significant moves to regulate the sale of guns and promote gun safety. We aren’t even allowed to study statistics about deaths. “Between 1973 and 2012, the National Institutes of Health awarded 89 grants for the study of rabies and 212 for cholera — and only three for firearms injuries,” wrote Nicoloas Kristoff in an Op-Ed for The New York Times.

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, One-third of all households with children younger than 18 have a gun and more than 40 percent of gun-owning

households with children store their guns unlocked. Twenty-two percent of children with gun-owning parents handled guns in their homes without their parents’ knowledge. More than half of youth who committed suicide with a gun obtained the gun from their home, usually a parent’s gun.

Yet every time a story of a child getting their hands on a gun and killing themselves or someone else surfaces, gun owners quickly flock to comment sections to say, “This is an irresponsible, idiot parent!” People seem to think you can’t fix stupid with laws. But yes, you can. And we have to.