Wompedy Club: Christmas Cards Escapade

Aren't guns great?

I mean, they're cool, they make loud noises, they make people with complexes feel powerful, they kill people. . . what's not to like, seriously?

Back in the pre-Columbine days the Wompedy Club decided to spread holiday cheer and make people think about the problem of gun availability.

We produced a few thousand Christmas cards that showcased Sarah Dobbins who had been featured in Time Magazine. She was a 10 year old girl who owned a shotgun. Santa was nice enough to have given it to her.

The front of the card has Sarah and her quote, then the inside mentions the number kids who are killed daily by guns, and wished the recipient a merry Christmas from the NRA.

On the back of the card were a huge number of statistics about guns, and kids, and people, and dead people. The stats were pulled from the now gone ceasefire.org (a gun-control advocacy group) who had gotten them from all number of federal bureaus.

Every year since the original debut of these cards in the mid-late 1990s, we've divvied up the cards to various Wompedy Club members and made the rounds covertly placing them on the shelves of unsuspecting shop clerks' stores everywhere. Dallas, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, New Orleans, have all been blanketed (in some small degree) by the Wompedy Club and our anti-gun xmas card.

The cards are clearly marked as costing "$0," complete with a fake bar-code, featuring the number for They Might Be Giants dial-a-song underneath it.

In case you're looking for the stats, here they are, somewhat out of date now, but still telling:

Gun Stats:

More citizens die in handgun fire in just two days in the U.S. than in one year in Canada, Great Britain, Japan, Sweden, and Australia combined. SOURCE: Embassies and foreign crime reporting agencies/FBI Uniform Crime Reports. 1992.

Guns kept in the home are 43 times more likely to kill a family member, friend or acquaintance than an intruder. SOURCE: Kellermann AL and Teay DT. Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearm- related Deaths in the Home. New England Journal of Medicine. 1993.

A gun triples the risk of a homicide in the home. SOURCE: Kellermann AL, Rivara FP, Rushforth NB. Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home. New England Journal of Medicine. 1993.

An estimated 1.2 million elementary school-aged children come home to a house with a gun and no parent. SOURCE: Lee RK and Sacks JJ. Latchkey Children and Guns in Homes. Journal of the American Medical Association. 1990.

More preschoolers died from guns in 1994 than police officers killed in the line of duty. SOURCE: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Report: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. Washington, DC: U.S., Dept. of Justice. Report of the final mortality statistics, 1994.

Monthly Vital Report. 1996. Every day, 15 American children are killed by guns. SOURCE: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 1993.

U.S. children are 12 times more likely to die by gunfire than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined. SOURCE: Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, 1997.

Thirty percent of families with children keep loaded guns in the home. SOURCE: Weil DS and Hemenway D. Loaded Guns in the Home. Journal of the American Medical Association. 1992.

Hospital emergency room departments treat four children for gunshot wounds for every child killed by gunfire. SOURCE: Annest JL et al. National Estimates of Nonfatal Firearm-Related Injuries: Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg. Journal of the American Medical Association. 1995.

Handguns kill more than ten kids every day. SOURCE: Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research Estimate. 1996.

In 1994 gun deaths were the third leading cause of death for children aged 5-14. If current trends continue, firearm fatalities are projected to become the leading cause of injury-related death in this country by the year 2003. SOURCE: Singh GK, Kochanek KD, MacDorman MF. Advance report of final mortality statistics, 1994. Monthly Vital Report. 1996. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report. 1994.

Fifty-nine percent of students, grades 6-12, reported that they could get a handgun if they wanted one; 36 percent of those who said they could get a handgun reported that they could obtain it within an hour. SOURCE: LH Research, Inc. A Survey of the American People on Guns as a Children's Health Issue. 1993.

In a nationwide profile of juvenile gun possession and use, 53 percent of students who said they carried a gun, said they obtained the gun from a family member while 37 percent obtained the gun off the street. SOURCE: McCarthy N. Children Not Escaping Tough on Crime Climate. California Bar Journal. 1995. California Bar Journal.

The risk of suicide is increased by nearly 5 times in homes with guns; the risk is higher still for adolescents and young adults. SOURCE: Kellermann AL, et al. Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home. The New England Journal of Medicine. 1993.

Seventy-eight percent of firearm suicide attempts are fatal. SOURCE: Annest JL et al. National Estimates of Nonfatal Firearm-Related Injuries: Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg. Journal of the American Medical Association. 1995.

In 1992, firearm-related deaths accounted for 64.9 percent of the suicides among individuals under the age of 25. SOURCE: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 1995.

In 1992, 1,426 youth aged 0-19 committed suicide with a firearm. SOURCE: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Injury Mortality: National Summary of Injury Mortality Data 1986-1992. 1995.

Seventy-one percent of weapons involved in accidents were handguns. SOURCE: The U.S. General Accounting Office. 1991.

An analysis of 266 accidental handgun shootings of children aged 16 and under revealed that 50 percent of the accidents occurred in the victim's homes, and 38 percent occurred in the homes of friends and relatives. SOURCE: Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. Killing Seasons. 1989.

In 1991, gun accidents were the fifth leading cause of accidental death for children aged 14 and under. SOURCE: National Safety Council. Accident Facts. 1992.

One out of four American homes contains at least one handgun. SOURCE: National Opinion Research Center. General Social Surveys, 1972-1994: Cumulative Codebook. University of Chicago, The National Data Program for Social Sciences. 1994.

A new handgun is produced in the United States every 12 seconds. SOURCE: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. 1994.

There are more than 223 million firearms in the United States; 76 million are handguns. SOURCE: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. 1994.

Gunshot wounds are the second leading cause of death for all people aged 10-34. SOURCE: National Center for Health Statistics. 1993.

More Americans were killed by guns in two years than during the entire Vietnam War. SOURCE: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 1993.

Forty-one percent of American households contain one or more guns. SOURCE: National Opinion Research Center. General Social Surveys, 1972-1994: Cumulative Codebook. University of Chicago, The National Data Program for Social Sciences. 1994.

In 198 robberies and burglaries in gun-owning homes in Atlanta, guns were used for self-protection only three times. SOURCE: Kellermann AL. Weapons Involvement in Home Invasion Crimes. Journal of the American Medical Association. 1995.