US - Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year

Tragic. Preventable. Insane. Jmo.

los2188 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...dlers-have-shot-at-least-23-people-this-year/​

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Nothin' to see here, move along....... :banghead::gaah:

I searched for an update but this was the best I could do. Maybe we'll get an official number in January.

Accidental shootings kill a child every other day

Using information collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan research group, news reports and public sources, the media outlets spent six months analyzing the circumstances of every death and injury from accidental shootings involving children ages 17 and younger from Jan. 1, 2014, to June 30 of this year — more than 1,000 incidents in all.

Among the findings:

—Deaths and injuries spike for children under 5, with 3-year-olds the most common shooters and victims among young children.

—Accidental shootings spike again for ages 15-17, when victims are most often fatally shot by other children but typically survive self-inflicted gunshots.

—States in the South are among those with the highest per capita rates of accidental shootings involving minors.

Another finding: The vast majority of shooters and victims are boys.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 74 minors died from accidental discharges of firearms in 2014, the latest year for which comparable data are available. The AP and USA TODAY analysis counted 111 for that year, suggesting the federal government missed a third of the cases.

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When Kids Pull The Trigger, Who is Responsible? Not the Gun Owners*, the NRA says

102 Deaths in Two Years

Young children shoot themselves, other kids and adults with stunning frequency in America. From September 1, 2014, to September 1, 2016, a child younger than 13 was the perpetrator in at least 300 acts of gun violence, resulting in 102 deaths and 198 injuries, according to data provided by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit.

The vast majority of those shootings were unintentional, the result of a child playing with an unsecured firearm found in a drawer, a purse or the backseat of a car. Just more than half of them were self-inflicted, while slightly more than a quarter involved one child shooting another. The rest of the victims were adults. In all but a few instances, the shooter was a boy, and the gun usually belonged to a parent who had not properly locked it away.

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A study of Florida’s storage law**, published in the journal Pediatrics in 2000, concluded that child shooting deaths in Florida fell 51 percent in the eight years after it was adopted.The NRA now vehemently opposes codifying storage standards. It argues there is “no compelling need for such invasions of privacy.” Instead, the organization champions the education program, Eddie Eagle GunSafe. The curriculum, which the NRA enthusiastically promotes to public school districts, features a cool but sensible bird, Eddie Eagle, who teaches children between the ages of 4 and 10 what to do when they discover a gun: “Stop! Don’t touch. Run away. Tell a grown-up.”

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Loaded Guns, Little Hands <- article includes interactive graph

In the last two years, nearly 300 children under the age of 13 have injured or killed someone with a firearm.

The Gun Violence Archive collects information on shootings using media reports and other public sources of information. There is no reliable federal source of information about shootings by young children.

Half of all the young child shootings examined by The Trace were self-inflicted. In all but a few instances, the shooter was a boy. In at least 113 cases, the child who pulled the trigger was three years old or younger.

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There are 14 states with negligent firearm storage laws similar to the one proposed in Tennessee. Of those, only four &#8212; Florida, California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, along with the District of Columbia &#8212; allow prosecutors to charge adults whose unsecured guns are used by a child to shoot someone with a felony.

Only one state, Massachusetts, requires all firearms to be stored under lock and key.

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*????

**Florida law enacted in 1989 with help from an NRA lobbyist (!)

Totally preventable. Utterly heartbreaking for all involved.

One has to be an educated consumer of statistics.

Accidental injury is the number one cause of death in ALL age groups,from age 1 to 45.

Fully one third of all children killed in car accidents were unsecured. Shall we ban children riding in cars?

I could post many statistics and websites for child deaths that far exceed deaths from children who accidentally discover guns.

Deaths from household accidents such as oven/ stoves, electrical injuries, accidental strangulations from things like electrical cords, kids killed on household exercise equipment, bathtub drownings, fatal accidental overdoses of prescription, non-prescription, and illegal drugs, household poisonings, and any number of other horrific mishaps all exceed the number of kids killed by discovering firearms.

Any child killed accidentally is a tragedy, and a deep guilt and pain that never goes away for their loved ones. Firearm deaths are tragic and horrific, but "banning" firearms from legal citizens will not cure the problem. Many of the kids killed are shot after finding the illegal gun or stolen gun a criminal parent or other criminal adult carelessly left laying around. No amount of laws for "storage" or outright bans on legal and responsible gun ownership will fix that problem.

Those who seek to ban guns will always have statistics to present, often in isolation, to support their argument that guns should be banned from legal ownership, or that we should enact "special" storage regulations to make it "easier" to prosecute gun owners. (Do we have special household storage laws for poisons? Gas cans? Prescription drugs? Electrical cords? Of course not. Do we really want "Big Brother" to enter our homes to inspect them?)

Plenty of laws already exist for going after negligent parents or adults when a child is injured. The circumstances of each situation lead prosecutors to determine whether the owner was criminally negligent. Simply because a child discovered a gun and shot themselves or another, does not automatically mean the owner was criminally negligent, or the parents were. If a person is a gun opponent, they see each child gun death as an opportunity to prosecute "somebody", and argue to ban legal gun ownership.

But where is the outrage when a child dies in other household accidents? Why don't people get as outraged that kids are dying because they got into grandma's pills that she left out in little cups? Or drowned in the bathtub? Or ate uncle's stash of meth? Or ate pesticides that weren't secured properly? Or got themselves strangled or pinned under furniture or exercise equipment? Or that nobody put them in a proper carseat, and they died in a car accident that the adults survived?

K_Z said:

But where is the outrage when a child dies in other household accidents? Why don't people get as outraged that kids are dying because they got into grandma's pills that she left out in little cups? Or drowned in the bathtub? Or ate uncle's stash of meth? Or ate pesticides that weren't secured properly? Or got themselves strangled or pinned under furniture or exercise equipment? Or that nobody put them in a proper carseat, and they died in a car accident that the adults survived?

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Who says there isn't? Look around, and feel free to start a thread addressing any of them. I see outrage over those incidents all the time - look at how people react when there's a hot car death*, for instance. Keeping our kids alive is an issue most adults in the US care about and I don't think anyone who cares about kids getting their hands on guns doesn't care about kids not being fastened into their car seats or getting into someone's medication.

It's possible to care about more than one thing at a time. One can be outraged over toddler gun deaths and be outraged over toddlers drowning in bathtubs.

The numbers are staggering and tragic and you can compare all you want but it doesn't change the fact that in the last two years, nearly 300 children under the age of 13 have injured or killed someone with a firearm and there have been 102 deaths in two years. So if more kids died by other means there's no reason to address the gun deaths? :shakehead:

Anyway. Those other issues you mention might be part of a larger we care about children picture but they have nothing to do with kids and guns. There's no reason to argue about which is worse.

K_Z said:

No amount of laws for "storage" or outright bans** on legal and responsible gun ownership will fix that problem.

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I disagree. See the stat above for what happened in Florida.

*Not only are there threads about those but Cooper Harris has an entire forum here.

**Who said anything about a ban? This isn't an argument about gun control. It's about hey, can we somehow keep our kids from shooting themselves and other people?

I agree, keeping kids safe is the most important thing. And doing all we can to shape and influence safety in all aspects of appropriate parenting, and avoiding the circumstances and situations where accidents can occur.

Adoptive parents, and foster parents (the overwhelming number of which are ALREADY law abiding and safe, or they wouldn't be approved to adopt or foster) are required to take a lot of parenting educational classes, and submit to background checks, and ongoing supervision after adoption. It's just too bad, IMO, that this same level of education, background checks, and supervision isn't applied to EVERY person who seeks to become a parent, because there is clearly (according to their behavior and background) a large swath of our population who should not reproduce, or attempt to raise children. IMO. (And I can hear the sputtering and indignation.)

Anyway, having said that, focusing on education of adults is the best method for keeping kids safe around guns.

And that means BOTH adults who own guns, as well as adults who DO NOT own guns. Anyone who parents a child, or spends any amount of time supervising children, should be educated on how to talk with kids about guns, and gun safety. I personally think a gun safety topic should be added to the DARE curriculum, or taught at least once a year K-12. EVERY child should know abut gun safety, just as we worry about whether they can swim, and teach "stranger danger", fire safety plans, and "bad touching".

Gun safety is for ALL kids, not just kids of legal gun owners. Personally, I think kids in homes that don't own guns are at FAR greater risk than kids who live in homes with guns, because they may have so little practical knowledge or discussion about safety at home, and may be more curious than kids who are educated on safety on an ongoing basis.

This is a good start:

https://eddieeagle.nra.org/parents

Parents play a key role in developing safe practices and are ultimately responsible for the behavior and safety of their children. Isolated lessons and concepts can quickly be forgotten but with repetition, children remember standard safety procedures. The goal of the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program is to help you bring up an important safety issue with your child. It's not a complicated or confusing message, and it's easy and fun to teach. If children see a gun, they need to remember:


STOP!
This first step is crucial. Stopping first allows your child the time he or she needs to remember the rest of the safety instructions.


Don’t Touch
A firearm that is not touched or disturbed is unlikely to fire and otherwise endanger your child or other people.


Run Away
This removes the temptation to touch the firearm as well as the danger that another person may negligently cause it to fire.


Tell a Grown-up
Children should seek a trustworthy adult, neighbor, relative or teacher – if a parent or guardian is not available.

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Toddlers kill.

[video=youtube;vjlxXAy1_eE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjlxXAy1_eE[/video]

It saddens me when the first response isn't "How can we prevent this" but something along the lines of "Ok but kids die other ways too."

los2188 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...dlers-have-shot-at-least-23-people-this-year/​

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Came across this old post by Los.

How was the next year comparatively statwise?
:bump:

margarita25 said:

Came across this old post by Los.

How was the next year comparatively statwise?
:bump:

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It's doubly sad that the only way the public can assemble this data is from searching the news media for stories. That's ridiculous.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the FBI, CDC and other LE agencies kept statistics on gun incidents. Apparently the NRA and other groups pressured the government to stop gathering those statistics.

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-to-stifle-gun-violence-research

Federal limits on both research into gun violence and the release of data about guns used in crimes are powerful reminders of the lobbying group's advantages over gun control activists. For decades, the NRA pushed legislation that stifled the study and spread of information about the causes of gun violence.

I see the NRA as taking away a right to know something here, yet they claim they are all about rights. Hypocrites imo.

Toddler shoots her mom with a gun her dad left in their car, police say

Brazier left the loaded Glock19 9mm handgun between the center armrest and the front passenger seat, police said. His 3-year-old daughter got hold of it, and Thomas told police she heard a "loud pop, like a balloon." Then she realized the blood she saw was coming from her own body.

Brazier was charged with two counts of criminal recklessness and two counts of neglect of a dependent.

The children were placed in custody of the Indiana Department of Child Services and remain there.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/19/us/toddler-accidentally-shoots-mom-trnd/index.html

LE is doing what they can by laying charges and removing the kids, hoping the courts will follow through - as a deterrent to others.