Josh Hafner

USA TODAY

C orrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of accidental gun deaths in 2014.

In a nation where someone utters the phrase “guns don’t kill people, people do” in nearly every gun debate, a new gun control campaign agrees and goes a step further: It’s not just people that kill people, but toddlers.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence released a satirical video Monday calling for the deportation of toddlers, who obtained firearms and shot people on a weekly basis in 2015. The ad begins with a barrage of images showing children holding firearms.

“We need to lock them up,” a narrator says. “Not the guns. That’s just un-American. The toddlers. Round them up. Deport them. Get them out of our country. And keep them away from our guns. Guns don’t kill people; toddlers kill people. Keep America safe.”

The ad points to a site, ToddlersKill.org, that features a “Toddler Map” that warns where toddlers are located nationally and a section on “toddler amnesty.”

While acknowledging the campaign's tongue-in-cheek nature, Brady Campaign President Dan Gross said more can be done to keep irresponsible people from obtaining guns.

“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,” he said in a statement.

There are now more guns in the United States than people, and toddler-involved shootings are on the rise. Children now die in accidental shootings at a pace of every other day in the United States, as the USA TODAY and the Associated Press recently reported.

A Harvard study found that 7 out of 10 American children who lived in a home with a firearm knew where their parents stored their guns, even when hidden.

Possible solutions to end deaths stemming from child-involved shootings have been proposed, as the Washington Post noted. Those include smart guns, which use the same fingerprint-reading technology used to unlock iPhones, and laws requiring that adults lock up guns at home.

Both such proposals met strong opposition from the National Rifle Association, which described smart gun technology and lock requirements as invasive.

Critics of gun control have argued that lives lost to accidental gun deaths – 586 in 2014, according to federal data – come with the territory in a country that prizes gun rights.

Such critics include former Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who drew controversy for responding to an Oregon school shooting by saying “stuff happens.”

“The cumulative effect of this is, in some cases, you don’t solve the problem by passing the law,” Bush later said, “and you’re imposing on large numbers of people burdens that make it harder for our economy to grow, make it harder to protect liberty.”

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