If gun owners need a reminder to make sure their weapons are stored safely, here it is: The Why Axis website reports that the number of children under 4 firing a gun has increased noticeably since 2020.
An organization named Everytown, which advocates for gun control, has tracked these shootings for several years. While incidents of toddlers firing a weapon remain a very small percentage of each year’s gun injuries or fatalities, it has to be a concern when they’re on the rise.
Each year from 2015 to 2017, there were about 60 confirmed cases in which a child under 4 fired a gun, shooting themselves or someone else. In both 2018 and 2019, the number was around 50, but in 2020 it was 77 and in 2021 it was 87.
Through April 12 of this year, at least 23 toddler cases have been reported. If that rate holds for the entire year, there will be around 90 such shootings.
Many of these shootings, if not all, are preventable. It’s clear that they’re occurring most often when a child gets hold of a gun because an adult carelessly left it unprotected.
Just in the last six weeks, a 2-year-old boy shot and killed his 4-year-old sister while they were in a car at a convenience store in Pennsylvania. A 3-year-old in Illinois shot his mother in the neck and killed her when he found a gun in the back seat of the family car. And in Tennessee a 3-year-old shot and killed himself when he fired an AR-15 that he found at his uncle’s house.
This is not a gun-control editorial. When up to 20,000 Americans per year are killed by gunfire, the number of cases involving children under 4 are minimal. And when a toddler fires a gun, there is no intent to injure or kill.
But this is definitely a gun-safety editorial. When a toddler fires a gun and someone dies, it is clear that at least one adult and perhaps more were not treating a firearm with the respect it demands.
Since 2015, The Why Axis said, there have been at least 473 cases in which a toddler fired a gun. Most of them have been in the South and Midwest; generally a rectangle from Texas and Florida north to Michigan and Wisconsin.
Mississippi and Louisiana are in that rectangle. Mississippi has reported between 10 and 19 toddler shootings over the past seven years, while Louisiana has reported more than 20.
Again, that’s not a lot of cases — probably an average of two or three per year. The likelihood of such a shooting occurring is extremely small — but that is no comfort at all to the families that have been affected by these shootings.
Gun ownership is not the issue. The Second Amendment protects that right, just like the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press.
But with rights come responsibilities. The First Amendment does not give someone the right to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater, for example. And the Second Amendment cannot be inferred to give someone the right to leave a loaded, unlocked gun in a place where a child might find it — and pull the trigger.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
