One of the stories of my mom's childhood that I remember the most is the story of her friend being shot and killed by his brother with an "unloaded" gun. They were playing, thinking the gun didn't have ammo in it, and found out the hard way that it did.
That was in the 1950s, and seven decades later, there are still unintentional shootings that involve children. An incident in Kansas, though, highlights the root cause of these incidents.
That cause? Parents failing completely:
New information has been released regarding the tragic shooting death of a 7-year-old boy in southeast Wichita earlier this month.
According to court documents, shortly after midnight on March 16, officers responded to a call about a shooting at an apartment complex in the 3700 block of East Ross Parkway, an area southeast of Pawnee and Hillside. A 911 caller reported that a 4-year-old had been playing with a gun and a 7-year-old had been shot.
When officers arrived at the scene, they found 7-year-old Davion Gunter outside the apartments with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was taken to the hospital, where he died from his injuries.
...
As officers cleared the apartment, they determined that it belonged to 25-year-old Tasha Dillard, who admitted to hosting a small party with some friends that evening.
In an interview with police, one of the friends said the seven children, ranging in age from nine to one, were inside the apartment playing while the adults stayed outside in a car, drinking tequila.
So we had parents leaving kids unattended while getting hammered – no, I have no idea why they were in a car drinking when there was a perfectly good apartment available for the purposes – and leaving a gun also unattended.
It's a recipe for disaster.
While many gun control advocate use these instances to justify various anti-gun measures, such as mandatory gun storage laws, the truth of the matter is that parents who would leave a gun just sitting in a purse with kids running around and no adult supervision just so they could drink is probably not a parent that is going to actually follow the relevant gun control laws in their state.
This case is rather extreme, admittedly, but I've seen far too many reports of these unintentional shootings involving children, and they almost universally include kids doing things they shouldn't be doing and a lack of adult supervision or responsibility.
And contrary to what many think, you just can't mandate that sort of thing.
Sure, you can dictate that guns must be locked up when not in use, but that sort of thing only comes into play following a tragedy like this one. What's more, you can prosecute people without it, as we've seen in this case and the prosecution of parents over mass shootings such as the Oxford shooting in Michigan or the Appalachee shooting in Georgia.
Instead, you need to teach responsibility and the ramifications of people's actions first and foremost.
Unfortunately, every effort made to educate people gets anti-gun commentary about how those pushing for that sort of thing just want to normalize guns and indoctrinate people into being gun owners, as if that's a terrible thing in and of itself.
Yet, until we do it, we'll keep seeing these sorts of things.
They're rare, but they're tragic, and they don't have to happen. You're just not going to stop them with a new law.
