Showing posts with label Child deaths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Child deaths. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Toddlers and Handguns: America's Self-Inflicted Tragedies Are Not Just Freak Accidents

by Nomad

The number of children injured and dead from accidental shootings is a national disgrace. Clearly guns and children don't mix but that doesn't stop many parents from patriotically exercising their second amendment rights. Even if it costs them their children.

Last month, in Lunenburg County, Virginia, a two-year-old boy shot himself in the head. According to law enforcement, the boy found a loaded gun on the dresser and pulled the trigger. Days later, the boy died of his self-inflicted wounds. 

That same weekend in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, another two-year-old named Zackary also shot himself with a loaded gun that had been left out in plain sight.
Montoursville police say the loaded handgun was lying on the couple’s bed Thursday and the two year old grabbed it, walked downstairs, and accidentally shot himself. The bullet went through his leg and is lodged in his back.
On May 23, a three-year old Mississippi boy died after shooting himself in the face while playing with a gun. A few weeks earlier, a 2-year-old Arizona boy also shot himself in the face with his father's handgun. Having found the gun wrapped up in sheets on the man's bed, the boy fired one round which hit him in the face and exited through his head He is expected to survive the accident. The damage and disfigurement will no doubt be a tragic feature of his life.

Earlier that same month, in Peoria Illinois, yet another child, Christian, found a family gun while playing in his father's bedroom and shot himself in the face.
Friends of the family said in TV news interviews that normally the gun would have been locked up but this, they said, was a "freak accident."

However, there seems to be a distressingly large number of these so-called accidents to call them "freak." We are only talking about one month, after all.