State Vaccination Exemption Policy Makes A Difference

Mother Jones has just run a very nice analysis of recent years' research on state laws governing non-medical exemption from childhood vaccines. It turns out that if a state makes it very easy for parents to exempt their children from recommended school vaccinations for non-medical reasons, lots of parents will exempt their children. This causes loss of herd immunity, and children die of childhood diseases that haven't been common for decades. And when one state (Washington) tightened up its rules by requiring a doctor's signature for exempting children from vaccination, exemption rates fell by 40%.

Meanwhile, cases of measles are on the rise in California--more than half of them involving children who were intentionally not vaccinated.

A Well-Regulated Militia Being Necessary...

Okay, so we knew that almost 3500 youths under 21 were killed by gunshots annually, and that gunshot wounds accounted for 21,000 emergency room visits each year. What we didn't know was that, quite apart from deaths, 20 American kids were hospitalized each day from gunshot wounds.Sure, guns guarantee our liberty, to some extent. But is our right to defend ourselves with firearms against the fully-mobilized Army of a futuristic dictatorial US, or against the black helicopters of the new One World Government, really so important that we can't risk some regulation  (background checks, limits on use of guns by mentally ill people, lock boxes) to try to save the 3500 deaths and 7300 hospitalizations of youth we're experiencing each year now?