One might make the argument of "Survival of the fittest" but that wouldn't be very satisfying to anyone. However, there is likely nothing people will do to prevent it as more children get a hold of loaded guns. It says something that it is so dangerous where some people live that they feel they HAVE to have loaded guns where toddlers can find them and use them on others or themselves.
MY wife mentioned to me that this sort of thing happened all the time in the 1950s and 1960s when we grew up but it wasn't mentioned as much then because it was a pretty common occurrence back then.
This happens when children are not old enough or competent enough to be trained what to do around loaded weapons. Since the U.S. has a history of loaded rifles in homes since the 1600s it is a long standing tradition especially in the more Southern or Western parts of the U.S. that tend to be wilder with more critters or people that might cause problems
Begin quote from:
Guns in Tiny Hands: In a Week, Four Toddlers Die
Shootings by preschoolers are happening at a pace of about two
per week. Here are the stories of Holston, Kiyan, Za’veon and
Sha’Quille.
KANSAS
CITY, Mo. — Sha’Quille Kornegay, 2 years old, was buried in a pink
coffin, her favorite doll by her side and a tiara strategically placed
to hide the self-inflicted gunshot wound to her forehead.
She
had been napping in bed with her father, Courtenay Block, late last
month when she discovered the 9-millimeter handgun he often kept under
his pillow in his Kansas City, Mo., home. It was equipped with a laser
sight that lit up like the red lights on her cousins’ sneakers. Mr.
Block told the police he woke to see Sha’Quille by his bed, bleeding and
crying, the gun at her feet. A bullet had pierced her skull.
In a country with more than 30,000 annual gun deaths, the smallest fingers on the trigger belong to children like Sha’Quille.
During a single week in April, four toddlers — Holston, Kiyan, Za’veon and Sha’Quille — shot and killed themselves, and a mother driving through Milwaukee
was killed after her 2-year-old apparently picked up a gun that had
slid out from under the driver’s seat. It was a brutal stretch, even by
the standards of researchers who track these shootings.
These
are shooters who need help tying their shoelaces, too young sometimes
to even say the word “gun,” killed by their own curiosity.
They
accidentally fire a parent’s pistol while playing cops and robbers,
while riding in a shopping cart, after finding it in the pocket of the
coat their father forgot to wear to work. The gun that killed Sha’Quille
last Thursday was pointing up, as if being inspected, when it fired.
They
are the most maddening gun deaths in America. Last year, at least 30
people were killed in accidental shootings in which the shooter was 5 or
younger, according to Everytown For Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group that tracks these shootings, largely through news reports.
With
shootings by preschoolers happening at a pace of about two per week,
some of the victims were the youngsters’ parents or siblings, but in
many cases the children ended up taking their own lives.
“You
can’t call this a tragic accident,” said Jean Peters Baker, the
prosecutor of Jackson County, Mo., who is overseeing the criminal case
in Sha’Quille’s death. Her office charged Mr. Block, 24, with
second-degree murder and child endangerment. “These are really
preventable, and we’re not willing to prevent them.”
Gun
control advocates say these deaths illustrate lethal gaps in gun safety
laws. Some states require locked storage of guns or trigger locks to be
sold with handguns. Others leave safety decisions largely to gun
owners.
Twenty-seven states have laws that hold adults responsible for letting children have unsupervised access to guns, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence,
though experts say such measures have, at best, a small effect on
reducing gun deaths. Massachusetts is the only state that requires gun
owners to store their guns in a locked place, though it has not stopped
youngsters there from accidentally killing themselves or other children.
Gun
rights groups have long opposed these kinds of laws. They argue that
trigger locks can fail, that mandatory storage can put a gun out of
reach in an emergency, and that such measures infringe on Second
Amendment rights.
“It’s
clearly a tragedy, but it’s not something that’s widespread,” said
Larry Pratt, a spokesman and former executive director of Gun Owners of
America. “To base public policy on occasional mishaps would be a grave
mistake.”
In
Kansas City, Sha’Quille’s family is trying to come to grips with her
death and the murder charge facing Mr. Block. In interviews, several
relatives said they did not believe he deserved to be convicted of
felony murder, but some questioned his judgment in leaving a loaded gun
out while he slept as well as his actions after he discovered that his
daughter was grievously wounded.
According
to court records, Mr. Block told the police that immediately after the
shooting, he went to the bathroom, wrapped the gun in a shirt and put it
into a vent in the floor. He then ran outside carrying his dying
daughter and yelled for a neighbor to call for help. He was also charged
with evidence tampering.
Sha’Quille’s
mother, Montorre Kornegay, said that she had recently separated from
Mr. Block after more than five years together, but that they remained
close. She said he loved the girl, whose first word was “Daddy.” When he
called Ms. Kornegay from jail, he told her he was sorry and talked
about how much he missed Sha’Quille.
The
girl was just 2, but wanted to be older, telling people she was already
5. She would run through the house, playing her own private game of
peekaboo, relatives said. In a cacophony of squeaky children at home,
relatives could always distinguish Sha’Quille’s low, raspier voice. One
day, she’ll be a singer, they told one another.
“What
happened was wrong,” Ms. Kornegay said. She said that she did not think
Mr. Block deserved to face a murder charge, but that he had behaved
irresponsibly. “Why didn’t you stay up and watch her?”
Parents,
police officers and neighbors from Georgia to California are asking
similar painful questions this week. Here are some of their stories.
‘Stay With Me’
In
2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of
young children and teenagers, according to Everytown’s database. During
the week in April when Sha’Quille and the other children died, there
were at least five other accidental shootings by children and teenagers.
Alysee Defee, 13, was shot in the armpit with a 20-gauge shotgun she
had used for turkey hunting in Floyd County, Ind. Zai Deshields, 4,
pulled a handgun out of a backpack at her grandmother’s home in
Arlington, Tex., and shot her uncle in the leg.
A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely to be 3 years old, the statistics show.
Holston
Cole was 3, a boy crackling with energy who would wake before dawn, his
pastor said. He loved singing “Jesus Loves Me” and bouncing inside the
inflatable castle in his family’s front yard in Dallas, Ga.
About
7 a.m. on April 26, he found a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol in his
father’s backpack, according to investigators. The gun fired, and
Holston’s panicked father, David, called 911. Even before a dispatcher
could speak, Mr. Cole wailed “No, no!” into the phone, according to a
redacted recording.
Mr.
Cole pleaded for his 3-year-old son to hold on until the ambulance
could arrive: “Stay with me, Holston,” he can be heard saying on a 911
tape, his voice full of desperation. “Can you hear me? Daddy loves you.
Holston. Holston, please. Please.”
Holston was pronounced dead that morning.
The
local authorities have been weighing what can be a difficult decision
for prosecutors and the police after these shootings: Whether to charge a
stricken parent or family member with a crime. While laws vary among
states, experts said decisions about prosecution hinge on the specific
details and circumstances of each shooting. What may be criminal neglect
in one child’s death may be legally seen as a tragic mistake in
another.
Officials
with the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office have suggested that they
expect Mr. Cole to face, at most, a charge of reckless conduct.
“Anything
that we do, criminally speaking, is not going to hold a candle to the
pain that this family feels,” said Sgt. Ashley Henson, a spokesman for
the sheriff’s office. Sergeant Henson said investigators had sensed
early on that the shooting was accidental. “You want to be able to
protect your family and take care of your family, but on the same hand,
you’ve got to be safe with your weapons,” he said.
Some
gun control groups have urged states and district attorneys to
prosecute such cases more aggressively, saying that, grief aside, people
need to be held responsible for what are easily preventable deaths.
Brent
Moxey, the pastor who officiated at Holston’s funeral, said the boy’s
father was already haunted. “I think he runs the scenario over and over
and over in his mind.” Mr. Moxey said the family — which did not respond
to a message left at their home seeking comment — was still asking for
privacy.
About
1,000 mourners attended Holston’s funeral on April 30, remembering a
boy who loved superheroes and would sometimes wrestle cardboard boxes.
The day he died, he spent time alongside his mother, Haley, as she read
the Bible, playing with the highlighter pen she used to note passages,
Mr. Moxey said.
“This
little boy loved to tinker and to play, and he loved to get into
things,” Mr. Moxey said, describing the very impulse that probably led
to Holston’s death. “He loved to figure out how stuff works.”
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A Ringing Purse
In
Indianapolis, Kanisha Shelton would stay protectively near her
2-year-old son, Kiyan, watchful of the stray dogs known to roam through
the neighborhood.
But
on the night of April 20, Ms. Shelton stepped away from the boy,
leaving him in the kitchen while she was upstairs. She had placed her
purse out of his reach on the kitchen counter, but when her phone
started ringing, the boy apparently pushed a chair close to the counter,
climbed onto it and reached for the purse, according to an account from
a cousin, John Pearson. There was also a .380-caliber Bersa pistol in
it.
Just
after 9 p.m., Ms. Shelton heard a loud bang and rushed downstairs.
There, in the kitchen, she found Kiyan lying on the floor, bleeding from
a gunshot wound to the chest. He was rushed to a local children’s
hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Ms.
Shelton’s mother, who answered her daughter’s cellphone, said the
family did not want to speak about the death. No criminal charges have
been filed.
The
police in Indianapolis said such scenes were becoming more common. “The
mother was obviously very shaken up,” Capt. Richard Riddle said.
Indeed, on Sunday night, another child, 10 years old, died in what the
police say appears to have been another accidental shooting.
A 2013 investigation
by The New York Times of children killed with firearms found that
accidental shootings like these were being vastly undercounted by
official tabulations, and were occurring about twice as often as records
said.
Dr. Garen J. Wintemute,
an emergency physician and a researcher at the University of
California, Davis, who studies the public health effects of gun
violence, said that nearly everyone — from toddlers to adults — can fail
to accurately distinguish toy guns from real guns, loaded guns from
unloaded ones.
“That doesn’t stop them from playing with it,” he said.
Mr.
Pearson said he sympathized with Ms. Shelton and thought of Kiyan’s
death as a tragic accident. “It was up on the counter, so I do think she
thought she put the gun away, out of the baby’s reach,” Mr. Pearson
said. “She’s going to be in a living hell.”
Essie
Jones, who lives across the street, said Ms. Shelton had recently
taught Kiyan to ride a small bicycle with training wheels, guiding him
on the bike in the driveway. “They’d be up in the yard playing,” she
said. “He was very happy.”
In
a condolence book online, Dianna Mitchell-Wright, who identified
herself as “Auntie,” wrote of her anguish over losing the boy she had
nicknamed “My Main Man.”
“All I have are memories,” she said, “and your pictures in my cellphone.”
Anguished Goodbyes
The
coffin that held Za’veon was no bigger than a piece of carry-on
luggage, and it was so light that two pallbearers easily carried it
through the packed St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Bermuda, La.
His
full name was Za’veon Amari Williams, but to his family in
Natchitoches, the 3-year-old was known as Baby Zee. On April 22, he
found a pistol and shot himself in the head, according to Detective John
Greely of the Natchitoches Police Department. When paramedics arrived,
they found the mother cradling the boy and crying that he was not
breathing, according to KSLA News 12.
The
police arrested a companion of the mother, Alverious Demars, 22, on
charges of negligent homicide and obstruction of justice. Detective
Greely said that the police believed that the pistol belonged to Mr.
Demars, and that he hid it after the toddler shot himself. The police
have not found the weapon.
“As
a responsible adult it’s his obligation to secure that — to make sure a
child does not get ahold of it,” Detective Greely said, explaining why
Mr. Demars had been arrested.
The
family declined to speak, but in a Facebook post, the boy’s mother,
Destiny Williams, wrote that she had not been able to sleep and was a
“useless sad waste.” “I can’t take life,” she wrote. “Why is it so cruel
and unrelenting and unforgiving.”
The funerals for these children were filled with a similar anguish.
At
the funeral for Baby Zee, the wails and screams grew so loud during a
final moment of goodbye that ushers closed the church doors to give the
family privacy. In Georgia, Holston’s father tearfully read a letter
that reflected on how the family used to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” At the
Kansas City funeral for Sha’Quille, family members crumpled as they
looked into the coffin, shaking with tears or kissing her.
The
day after Sha’Quille was buried, her maternal grandmother, Pamala
Kornegay, reflected on the girl who was missing from the cluster of
grandchildren who sat coloring on her living room floor. Ms. Kornegay
said she was not angry with Sha’Quille’s father.
“We’re
just upset,” she said. “It was careless. It could have been prevented.”
So senseless, she said, because Mr. Block had loved his daughter so
dearly.
“He would take a bullet for her,” she said.
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