Illinois' 'fracking' future fractured









Thousands of landowners downstate have sold their rights to drill for oil and natural gas for upfront fees ranging from $50 to $350 per acre, plus a cut of the profits.

Others are fighting to prevent the drilling out of fear that they could be exposed to drinking water contamination, earthquakes, toxic gases and industrialization.

In the middle of this battle are Illinois legislators who have yet to pass laws to deal with horizontal hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking. The issue is expected to be taken up again this year.





Horizontal hydraulic fracturing has opened up vast reserves of natural gas deposits in the U.S. that until now were impossible to tap. The drilling technique uses pressurized sand, water and chemicals to crack open layers of rock that trap such fuels hundreds or thousands of feet below ground.

The stampede to unleash such fuels has been compared to the Gold Rush of the 1840s. And in addition to the money being made by landowners in selling drilling rights, the fracking rush has brought jobs to other parts of the country.

"Other states have found the way to find the sweet spot to protect the environment and bring jobs; we should not miss that boat," said Tom Wolf, executive director of the Energy Council at the Illinois Chamber of Commerce.

For people desperate for jobs, a shale gas boom downstate can't come soon enough. Many counties are dealing with unemployment rates that top 10 percent.

Proponents of fracking hope to inject new life into areas of the state where a once-vibrant coal industry has declined precipitously. At the same time, there's a fear drilling will never begin unless the companies that want to extract the gas know what regulatory risks they face.

"If legislation doesn't pass at some point this year, from the state's perspective the risk is that the industry might invest elsewhere in other states that have more favorable conditions to invest in and develop these sorts of wells," said Leonard Kurfirst, a partner at Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP in Chicago who practices environmental law, chemical product liability litigation and regulatory compliance.

The state has laws to deal with gas and oil wells, but those regulations date to 1983 — before modern horizontal drilling techniques were used.

Without meaningful regulation, some landowners are learning that their property rights don't necessarily extend to what's buried beneath the surface. Some have found that their mineral rights were sold years before or that if enough neighbors give permission to drill, they can be forced to join them. Others, who want to test their drinking water for the presence of fracking chemicals, are learning they could be denied access to such information if companies claim it's proprietary.

Commonly referred to as the New Albany shale play, the gas lies in the Illinois basin, a 60,000-square-mile area that encompasses parts of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates New Albany holds 11 trillion cubic feet of shale gas, approximately enough to meet the needs of about 5 million households for 30 years, according to the American Gas Association.

Hydraulic fracturing has been around for more than 60 years, but the modern methods that have led to the shale gas boom were not used until the turn of this century. Unlike vertical wells of the past, modern horizontal wells vastly multiply the exploitable area of a well and involve more chemicals and water.

According to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, about 250,000 gallons might be used to frack a vertical well compared with as much as 5 million gallons to frack a horizontal well.

Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing Our Environment (SAFE) is one of several organizations and environmental groups that want a moratorium on fracking in Illinois until a task force looks into the risks associated with hydraulic fracturing and recommends what kinds of regulations need to be in place.

The Illinois Chamber of Commerce is among those opposed to SAFE's proposal, which is similar to what New York state adopted with a four-year-old moratorium that has stalled natural gas development efforts.

"There is no energy source that is perfect for the environment or the economy. If there was, we would be using it," Wolf said.

Without regulations in place, a tacit moratorium already exists, Wolf said, explaining that drillers won't go forward with wells only to learn later that they face environmental regulations, new taxes or other unexpected hurdles.

The chamber released a study last month from David Loomis, a professor of economics at Illinois State University and director of the Center for Renewable Energy, estimating that downstate fracking could create 1,000 to 47,000 direct and indirect jobs depending on how many wells were drilled and what level of local resources were used.

Opponents countered that such jobs studies tend to be overly optimistic and don't take into account harmful environmental and quality-of-life issues that could come with fracking.





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Aaron Swartz, Internet activist and programmer, dead at 26









Internet activist and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who helped create an early version of the Web feed system RSS and later played a key role in stopping an online piracy bill in Congress, has committed suicide at age 26, authorities said on Saturday.


Police found Swartz's body hanging in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday, according to the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, which ruled the death a suicide.


Swartz, a native of north suburban Highland Park, is widely credited with being a co-author of the specifications for the Web feed format RSS 1.0, which he worked on at age 14, according to a blog post on Saturday from his friend Cory Doctorow.





RSS is a format for delivering to users content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages and blogs.


Online tributes to Swartz have been posted at a number of top websites in the technology world.


"Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill and intelligence about people and issues," Doctorow wrote on his blog at Boing Boing.


Swartz also played a role in building the news sharing website Reddit, but left the company after it was acquired by Wired magazine owner Conde Nast.


In 2011, he was indicted on computer fraud and other charges related to the unauthorized download of academic journal articles at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pleaded not guilty. His trial was due to start in April.


Doctorow wrote that Swartz had "problems with depression for many years."


Swartz himself described his struggles with dark feelings.


In an online account of his life and work, Swartz said he became "miserable" after going to work at the San Francisco offices of Wired after Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast.


"I took a long Christmas vacation," he wrote. "I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign."


Swartz later founded the group Demand Progress and led a successful campaign to block a bill introduced in 2011 in the U.S. House of Representatives called the Stop Online Piracy Act, which generated fierce opposition in the technological community.


The bill, which was withdrawn amid public pressure, would have allowed court orders to curb access to certain websites deemed to be engaging in illegal sharing of intellectual property.


Swartz and other activists objected on the grounds it would give the government too many broad powers to censor and squelch legitimate Web communication.


Swartz also had been a fellow at a Harvard University research lab on institutional corruption, according to his website.


Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited as the most important figure in the creation of the World Wide Web, commemorated Swartz in a Twitter post on Saturday.


"Aaron dead," he wrote. "World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."


(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Doina Chiacu)





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Biden seeks video game industry input on guns






WASHINGTON (AP) — Looking for broader remedies to gun violence, Vice President Joe Biden is reaching out to the video game industry for ideas as the White House seeks to assemble proposals in response to last month’s massacre at a Connecticut elementary school.


Biden is scheduled to meet with video game representatives Friday as the White House explores cultural factors that may contribute to violent behavior.






The vice president, who is leading a task force that will present recommendations to President Barack Obama on Tuesday, met with other representatives from the entertainment industry, including Comcast Corp. and the Motion Picture Association of America, on Thursday.


Friday’s meeting comes a day after the National Rifle Association rejected Obama administration proposals to limit high-capacity ammunition magazines and dug in on its opposition to an assault weapons ban, which Obama has previously said he will propose to Congress. The NRA was one of the pro-gun rights groups that met with Biden during the day.


NRA president David Keene, asked Friday if the NRA has enough support in Congress to fend off legislation to ban sales of assault weapons, indicated it does. “I do not think that there’s going to be a ban on so-called assault weapons passed by the Congress,” he said on NBC’s “Today.”


In previewing the meeting with the video game industry, Biden recalled how the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York lamented during crime bill negotiations in the 1980s that the country was “defining deviancy down.”


It’s unclear what, if anything, the administration is prepared to recommend on how to address the depiction of violence in the media.


White House press secretary Jay Carney last month suggested that not all measures require government intervention.


“It is certainly the case that we in Washington have the potential, anyway, to help elevate issues that are of concern, elevate issues that contribute to the scourge of gun violence in this country, and that has been the case in the past, and it certainly could be in the future,” Carney said then.


In a statement, a half dozen entertainment groups, including the Motion Picture Association of America, said they “look forward to doing our part to seek meaningful solutions.”


On gun control, however, the Obama administration is assembling proposals to curb gun violence that would include a ban on sales of assault weapons, limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and universal background checks for gun buyers.


“The vice president made it clear, made it explicitly clear, that the president had already made up his mind on those issues,” Keene said after the meeting. “We made it clear that we disagree with them.”


Opposition from the well-funded and politically powerful NRA underscores the challenges that await the White House if it seeks congressional approval for limiting guns and ammunition. Obama can use his executive powers to act alone on some gun measures, but his options on the proposals opposed by the NRA are limited without Congress’ cooperation.


Obama has pushed reducing gun violence to the top of his domestic agenda following last month’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman slaughtered 20 children and six adults before killing himself. The president put Biden in charge of an administration task force and set a late January deadline for proposals.


“I committed to him I’d have these recommendations to him by Tuesday,” Biden said Thursday, during a separate White House meeting with sportsmen and wildlife groups. “It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the discussion, but the public wants us to act.”


The vice president later met privately with the NRA and other gun-owner groups for more than 90 minutes. Participants in the meeting described it as an open and frank discussion, but one that yielded little movement from either side on long-held positions.


Keene told NBC there is a fundamental disagreement over what would actually make a difference in curbing gun violence.


Richard Feldman, the president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, said all were in agreement on a need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But when the conversation turned to broad restrictions on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons, Feldman said Biden suggested the president had already made up his mind to seek a ban.


“Is there wiggle room and give?” Feldman said. “I don’t know.”


White House officials said the vice president didn’t expect to win over the NRA and other gun groups on those key issues. But the administration was hoping to soften their opposition in order to rally support from pro-gun lawmakers on Capitol Hill.


Biden’s proposals are also expected to include recommendations to address mental health care and violence on television, in movies and video games. Those issues have wide support from gun-rights groups and pro-gun lawmakers.


As the meetings took place in Washington, a student was shot and wounded at a rural California high school and another student was taken into custody.


During his meeting with sporting and wildlife groups, Biden said that while no recommendations would eliminate all future shootings, “there has got to be some common ground, to not solve every problem but diminish the probability that our children are at risk in their schools and diminish the probability that firearms will be used in violent behavior in our society.”


Several Cabinet members have also taken on an active role in Biden’s gun violence task force, including Attorney General Eric Holder. He met Thursday with Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest firearms seller, along with other retailers such as Bass Pro Shops and Dick’s Sporting Goods.


The president hopes to announce his administration’s next steps to tackle gun violence shortly after he is sworn in for a second term. He has pledged to push for new measures in his State of the Union address.


___


Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC


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Mike Tyson to punch up “Law & Order: SVU” with guest appearance






LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Mike Tyson is stepping into the ring with “Law & Order: SVU.”


The former boxing champ will guest-star on the NBC procedural drama next month, a spokeswoman for the network told TheWrap on Friday.






Tyson will play Reggie Rhodes, a murderer on death row who was victimized by a difficult childhood.


The episode is currently scheduled to air on February 13, just in time for Valentine’s Day.


Tyson has acted before, though he’s primarily played himself, perhaps most notably in “The Hangover” series of movies. (He’s also played onetime presidential candidate Herman Cain in a pair of short films.)


The role likely won’t be particularly challenging for Tyson, as he’s also spent time behind bars before, serving three years in prison for rape.


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‘Bodega Clinicas’ Draw Interest of Health Officials


HUNTINGTON PARK, Calif. — The “bodega clinicas” that line the bustling commercial streets of immigrant neighborhoods around Los Angeles are wedged between money order kiosks and pawnshops. These storefront offices, staffed with Spanish-speaking medical providers, treat ailments for cash: a doctor’s visit is $20 to $40; a cardiology exam is $120; and at one bustling clinic, a colonoscopy is advertised on an erasable board for $700.


County health officials describe the clinics as a parallel health care system, serving a vast number of uninsured Latino residents. Yet they say they have little understanding of who owns and operates them, how they are regulated and what quality of medical care they provide. Few of these low-rent corner clinics accept private insurance or participate in Medicaid managed care plans.


“Someone has to figure out if there’s a basic level of competence,” said Dr. Patrick Dowling, the chairman of the family medicine department at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Not that researchers have not tried. Dr. Dowling, for one, has canvassed the clinics for years to document physician shortages as part of his research for the state. What he and others found was that the owners were reluctant to answer questions. Indeed, multiple attempts in recent weeks to interview owners and employees at a half-dozen of the clinics in Southern California proved fruitless.


What is certain, however, is that despite their name, many of these clinics are actually private doctor’s offices, not licensed clinics, which are required to report regularly to federal and state oversight bodies.


It is a distinction that deeply concerns Kimberly Wyard, the chief executive of the Northeast Valley Health Corporation, a nonprofit group that runs 13 accredited health clinics for low-income Southern Californians. “They are off the radar screen,” said Ms. Wyard of the bodega clinicas, “and it’s unclear what they’re doing.”


But with deadlines set by the federal Affordable Care Act quickly approaching, health officials in Los Angeles are vexed over whether to embrace the clinics and bring them — selectively and gingerly — into the network of tightly regulated public and nonprofit health centers that are driven more by mission than by profit to serve the uninsured.


Health officials see in the clinics an opportunity to fill persistent and profound gaps in the county’s strained safety net, including a chronic shortage of primary care physicians. By January 2014, up to two million uninsured Angelenos will need to enroll in Medicaid or buy insurance and find primary care.


And the clinics, public health officials point out, are already well established in the county’s poorest neighborhoods, where they are meeting the needs of Spanish-speaking residents. The clinics also could continue to serve a market that the Affordable Care Act does not touch: illegal immigrants who are prohibited from getting health insurance under the law.


Dr. Mark Ghaly, the deputy director of community health for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said bodega clinicas — a term he seems to have coined — that agree to some scrutiny could be a good way of addressing the physician shortage in those neighborhoods.


“Where are we going to find those providers?” he said. “One logical place to consider looking is these clinics.”


Los Angeles is not the only city with a sizable Latino population where the clinics have become a part of the streetscape. Health care providers in Phoenix and Miami say there are clinics in many Latino neighborhoods.


But their presence in parts of the Los Angeles area can be striking, with dozens in certain areas. Visits to more than two dozen clinics in South Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley found Latino women in brightly colored scrubs handing out cards and coupons that promised a range of services like pregnancy tests and endoscopies. Others advertised evening and weekend hours, and some were open around the clock.


Such all-hours access and upfront pricing are critical, Latino health experts say, to a population that often works around the clock for low wages.


Also important, officials say, is that new immigrants from Mexico and Central America are more accustomed to corner clinics, which are common in their home countries, than to the sprawling medical complexes or large community health centers found in the United States. And they can get the kind of medical treatments — including injections of hypertension drugs, intravenous vitamins and liberally dispensed antibiotics — that are frowned upon in traditional American medicine.


The waiting rooms at the clinics reflected the everyday maladies of peoples’ lives: a glassy-eyed child resting listlessly on his mother’s lap, a fit-looking young woman waiting with a bag of ice on her wrist, a pensive middle-aged man in work boots staring straight ahead.


For many ordinary complaints, the medical care at these clinics may be suitable, county health officials and medical experts say. But they say problems arise when an illness exceeds the boundaries of a physician’s skills or the patient’s ability to pay cash.


Dr. Raul Joaquin Bendana, who has been practicing general medicine in South Los Angeles for more than 20 years, said the clinics would refer patients to him when, for example, they had uncontrolled diabetes. “They refer to me because they don’t know how to handle the situation,” he said.


The clinic physicians by and large appear to have current medical licenses, a sample showed, but experts say they are unlikely to be board certified or have admitting privileges at area hospitals. That can mean that some clinics try to treat patients who face serious illness.


Olivia Cardenas, 40, a restaurant worker who lives in Woodland Hills, Calif., got a free Pap smear at a clinic that advertises “especialistas,” including in gynecology. The test came back abnormal, and the doctor told Ms. Cardenas that she had cervical cancer. “Come back in a week with $5,000 in cash, and I’ll operate on you,” Ms. Cardenas said the doctor told her. “Otherwise you could die.”


She declined to pay the $5,000. Instead, a family friend helped her apply for Medicaid, and she went to a hospital. The diagnosis, it turned out, was correct.


Health care experts say the clinics’ medical practices would come under greater scrutiny if they were brought closer into the fold.


But being connected would mean the clinics’ cash-only business model would need to change. Dr. Dowling said the lure of newly insured patients in 2014 might draw them in. “To the extent there are payments available,” he said, “the legitimate ones might step up to the plate.”


This article was produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.



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The story behind Tribune's broken deal































































At the end of 2007, real estate tycoon Sam Zell took control of Tribune Co. in a deal that promised to re-energize the media conglomerate. But the company struggled under the huge debt burden the deal created, and less than a year later, it filed for bankruptcy.

One of Chicago's most iconic companies — parent to the Chicago Tribune — was propelled into a protracted and in many ways unprecedented odyssey through Chapter 11 reorganization.

On Dec. 31, after four years, Tribune Co. finally emerged from court protection under new ownership, but at a heavy cost. The company's value was diminished, its reputation was tarnished and its ability to respond to market opportunities during its long bankruptcy was constrained.

Tribune Co.'s bankruptcy saga began as an era of superheated Wall Street deal-making fueled by cheap money was coming to an end. The company's tale is emblematic of the American financial crisis itself, in which a seemingly insatiable appetite for speculative risk using exotic investment instruments helped trigger an economic collapse of historic proportions.

Tribune reporters Michael Oneal and Steve Mills, in a four-part series that begins today, tell the story of Tribune Co.'s journey into and through bankruptcy, throwing a spotlight on the key decisions and missed opportunities that marked a perilous time in the history of the company, the media industry and the economy.



Read the full story, "Part one: Zell's big gamble," as a digitalPLUS member.
To view videos and photos and for a look at the rest of the series visit, chicagotribune.com/brokendeal.





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Gary man sentenced to 80 years in abuse, death of son

Lake County Indiana Sheriff John Buncich and Bernard Eriks, grandfather of 13-year-old murder victim Christian Choate, talk about the sentencing of Riley Choate for the murder.









A Gary, Ind. man charged with keeping his 13-year-old son in a dog cage, then beating the boy to death and burying the body in a shallow grave near the family’s home in a trailer park was sentenced this morning to 80 years in prison.

Riley Choate, 40, entered a plea deal with Lake County, Ind., prosecutors this month with an agreed sentence that spares him some 40 years off the 120-year sentence he faced on charges tied to years of brutal abuse of his son, Christian, that led to the boy’s death in 2009.






The boy, who weighed less than 50 pounds when he died, had lived the last two years of his life confined to a 3-foot high dog cage, and was beaten regularly by his father.

“I can’t conceive of any set of facts charging neglect that could be any worse,” prosecutor Michael Woods said in court in Crown Point this morning.

Lake County Superior Court Judge Diane Boswell said there was plenty of blame to go around and several people had failed Christian.

“The pain and the suffering, the degradation this baby went through for two years of his life is incomprehensible,” Boswell said. “I can’t imagine any  circumstance when a parent would allow this.”

Choate addressed the judge briefly before the sentencing. “All my actions will haunt me forever. I loved my son,” he said.

Christian’s body was discovered by police investigators in 2011, after his older sister told relatives the boy had died two years earlier after Choate punched him repeatedly.

Choate and his wife, Kimberly Kubina, loaded the boy’s body into a tote, then buried him under concrete beneath a shed with a Bible laid across his chest. They told the other children — and, initially, police investigators -- that Christian had run away. The family moved to Kentucky not long after Christian died.

The sister, one of as many as 10 children living with Choate and his wife and co-defendant, Kimberly Kubina, in a single-wide trailer on the west side of Gary, had been removed from school in the Gary suburb of Merrillville in 2007 to be homeschooled. Kubina later admitted the children were pulled out of school because Choate’s abuse of the boy was escalating and Christian often was badly bruised.

The girl was charged with taking care of her brother, whom Choate and Kubina said had to be confined after he was caught “molesting” his younger step brother.

Christian initially was confined to a bedroom, then a bathroom, then was tied to a bed frame. After he managed to escape, he was locked in a dog cage they purchased from a neighbor. The boy was fed noodles twice a day, and given leftovers from dinner. The girl admitted she also beat and choked her brother regularly, and that she endured beatings at Choate’s hands as well.

Child welfare officials were infrequent visitors to the family’s trailer park, and had investigated abuse allegations against Choate involving children other than Christian. A neighbor said she twice called police, and in turn the Indiana Department of Child and Family Services, with concerns, but never saw an investigator enter the family’s trailer.

On April, 4, 2009, Christian’s sister told police the boy refused to eat, and an enraged Choate punched Christian “full force” several times in the head and threw him back into his cage, court records state. Christian died the following day. The Lake County coroner’s office listed the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head, and a skull fracture.

Kubina, who divorced Choate from jail in 2011, entered a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to cooperate in Choate’s prosecution. She is set to be sentenced in February on child neglect charges. She has told prosecutors she sometimes stopped Choate from beating Christian but never went to authorities to report the abuse because she feared losing custody of other children in the home.

Choate himself won custody of Christian and his sister in 2004. The children’s biological mother said she hadn’t seen the children since 2004.

Dennis Sullivan is a freelance reporter. Andy Grimm is a Tribune reporter.

agrimm@tribune.com

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Factbox: Video game industry meets with Biden gun task force






WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Representatives from the companies that make “first-person shooter” games such as “Call of Duty,” “Medal of Honor” and “Grand Theft Auto” met with Vice President Joe Biden on Friday as the Obama administration looks for ways to curb U.S. gun violence.


Biden is heading a task force formed after a gunman shot dead 20 children and six adults last month at a Connecticut elementary school. Biden plans to make recommendations on reducing gun violence to President Barack Obama by next Tuesday.






The vice president has held discussions with a wide range of groups including gun retailers, gun owners, the National Rifle Association gun rights lobbying organization, the film industry, victims of gun violence, and law enforcement authorities.


Following is a list of groups present at Friday’s meeting with Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.


Activision Blizzard Inc


Electronic Arts Inc


E-Line Media


Entertainment Software Association


Entertainment Software Ratings Board


Epic Games


GameStop Corp


Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop


Take-Two Interactive Software Inc


Texas A&M University


University of Wisconsin at Madison


Zenimax Media Inc


(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Will Dunham)


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ABC’s “Zero Hour” Will Conclude Conspiracies After Each Season






LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Paul Scheuring, the executive producer of ABC’s “Zero Hour,” says the conspiracy driving the new ABC drama will “100 percent” wrap up at the end of its first season.


Premeiring February 14, the show follows Anthony Edwards (“ER”) as the publisher of a magazine that investigates conspiracy theories. But after his wife (Jacinda Barrett) is abducted from her antique clock shop, Edwards’ character is pulled into one of the most compelling mysteries in human history. We don’t know exactly what that mystery is yet, but it involves clocks and Nazis.






Despite the massive scale of the tale, which stretches across the globe and back in time several centuries, season one’s storyline won’t be stretched across future seasons — a practice that Scheuring says leads to writers “flapping” their wings.


“One of the things I learned from ‘Prison Break’ and making a serialized show is that if you’re a single conceived show, like ‘Prison Break’ or ‘Lost,’” he said Thursday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. “Sooner or later you start flapping your wings because a story needs to end.”


So instead of trying to “stretch, stretch, stretch, stretch” the narrative, Scheuring modeled the series like “24.”


“It’s like the ’24′ model where you reset every year,” he continued. “This entire Nazi conspiracy thing will be done by episode 13 this year.”


But just like Jack Bauer’s addiction to danger in “24,” the characters in “Zero Hour” will dive into another conspiracy if they’re lucky enough to return for a second season.


“We have a group of investigators, headed by Anthony, at the magazine which can then apply those skills to the next investigation,” Scheuring concluded.


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Personal Health: Keeping Firearms Away From Children

I doubt that our forebears who ratified the Second Amendment in 1791 ever imagined how carelessly and callously firearms would be used centuries later. Witness the senseless slaughter of 20 innocent children and 6 adults last month in Newtown, Conn. As a mother of two and grandmother of four, I can’t imagine a more painful loss.

If you are as concerned as I am about the safety of your children and grandchildren, consider that it may be time for a grass-roots movement, comparable to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, to help break the stranglehold the National Rifle Association seems to have on our elected officials. Do you really want, as the association proposed, an armed guard in every school?

The Connecticut massacre occurred just two months after the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a new policy statement on firearm-related injuries to children. Murder and accidental shootings were not the academy’s only concerns. “Suicides among the young are typically impulsive,” the statement noted, “and easy access to lethal weapons largely determines outcome.”

In an article published online last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Judith S. Palfrey, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, and her husband, Dr. Sean Palfrey, also a pediatrician in Boston, highlighted the shocking statistics.

Every day in the United States, 18 children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 24 die from gun-related injuries. That makes guns the second leading cause of death in young people — twice the number of deaths from cancer, five times the deaths from heart disease and 15 times the deaths from infections.

Dr. Judith S. Palfrey has seen this heartbreak up close. “My niece, who was sad about something, might be alive today if she hadn’t had such easy access to a handgun at age 18,” she told me.

The United States has the dubious distinction of leading high-income countries in firearm homicides, suicides and unintentional deaths among young people. Among American children ages 5 to 14, an international study showed that firearm suicide rates were six times higher, and death rates from unintentional firearm injuries 10 times higher, than in other high-income countries.

Innocent Victims

The Palfreys said they were haunted by the death of one of their patients, a 12-year-old boy who went on an errand for his mother and was caught in the cross-fire of a gun battle. The boy had shortly before written a letter to his mother expressing his desire to become a doctor.

And Dr. Sean Palfrey recalls “with horror” picking up a loaded .22-caliber rifle, at age 11 or 12, and threatening his baby sitter with it. “This scared the hell out of me and remains seared in my memory. I could have killed this person.”

In explaining why he had a gun, he said, “I’m a great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, who was a hunter as well as a naturalist, and when I grew up guns were an acceptable part of youth. I took target practice and was an N.R.A. member myself as a child. We had guns for hunting, not automatic weapons that can shoot hundreds of rounds within seconds.”

Now, he said, “I do all my shooting with a camera. This is not the same world it was when the Second Amendment was written. Guns have to be removed so that they can’t be accessed by those who are immature, impulsive or mentally ill.”

In their article, the Palfreys pointed out that “little children explore their worlds without understanding danger, and in one unsupervised moment, an encounter with a gun can end in fatality.” School-age children who see guns used on television, in movies or video games “don’t necessarily understand that people who are really shot may really die,” they said.

Among teenagers, who may fight over girlfriends or sneakers, or have their judgment impaired by drugs or alcohol, “a fistfight may cause transient injuries, but a gunfight can kill rivals, friends, or innocent bystanders,” the pediatricians wrote. Among depressed adolescents, they said, “less than 5 percent of suicide attempts involving drugs are lethal, but 90 percent of those involving guns are.”

Preventing Access

In a 2006 study of gun-owning Americans with children under age 18, 21.7 percent stored a gun loaded, 31.5 percent stored one unlocked, and 8.3 percent stored at least one gun unlocked and loaded. And in households with adolescents ages 13 to 17, firearms were left unlocked 41.7 percent of the time.

These are accidents, or worse, waiting to happen, and the pediatrics academy reiterated its earlier recommendations that pediatricians talk to parents about guns in the home and their safe storage, and follow up by distributing cable locks.

To limit unauthorized access to guns, the academy recommended the use of trigger locks, lockboxes, personalized safety mechanisms, and trigger pressures that are too high for young children.

Still, the academy emphasized, “the safest home for a child or adolescent is one without firearms.”

The Palfreys said that when one of their colleagues asked a mother about guns in her home, she responded, “Why, yes, I have a loaded gun in the drawer of my bedside table.” It was only then the woman realized that this could be a danger to her child, Dr. Judith Palfrey said.

The academy also called for restoring the federal ban, in effect from 1994 to 2004, on the sale of assault weapons to the general public. None of the many attempts to renew it have succeeded in Congress.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2010, in the case of McDonald v. the City of Chicago, that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to provisions of the Second Amendment, and prevented states and localities from restricting citizens’ right to bear arms. The academy stated that the ruling “set the stage for Second Amendment legal challenges to local and state gun laws, including laws requiring the safe storage of firearms and trigger locks, as well as laws aimed at protecting children from firearms.”

In 2011, Florida passed legislation that raised First Amendment questions by forbidding doctors to ask families about guns in the home. Although a permanent injunction against the law was issued, Gov. Rick Scott has appealed the ruling. At the federal level, wording introduced into the Affordable Care Act restricts collection of data on guns in the home.


This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 11, 2013

The Personal Health column on Tuesday, about firearms and children, using information from The New England Journal of Medicine, misstated the number of children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 24 who die each day in the United States from gun-related injuries. Eighteen people between the ages of 1 and 24 die every day — not seven people between those ages. (Seven deaths a day is the number for children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 19.) And the article misstated part of a Supreme Court ruling. In the case of McDonald v. the City of Chicago in 2010, the court ruled that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — not the equal protection clause — applied to provisions of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 11, 2013

A chart posted with an earlier version of this article also misstated the number of children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 24 killed every day in the United States by gun injuries. It is 18, not seven.

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