Sadness always accompanies death — whether due to age, illness, accident or intention. Saddest of all are deaths from firearms because so many of them are preventable. And the most tragic of these are ones involving children.
A recent report from Everytown for Gun Safety — an organization formed in 2013 in the wake of the killing of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook school — focuses on incidents in the U.S. in which a child was the unintentional shooter. This happened almost once a day in the 8 years from 2015 to 2022.
As the report says, “Every year, hundreds of children in the United States gain access to unsecured, loaded guns . . . With tragic regularity, children pick up these unsecured guns and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else.”
These incidents occur primarily in a home, and the victim is most often also a child. About one third of shooters were 5 years old or younger; many were preschoolers.
The study found that states with two kinds of gun laws had significantly lower rates of unintentional child shootings: secure storage laws and laws that hold gun owners accountable when a child accesses an unsecured gun.
Combined with the report last year that gun deaths had out-stripped road accidents as the leading cause of death among children between the ages of 1 and 18, these data indicate that our states and our nation can do a much better job of keeping children alive with very modest changes in our gun laws.
In fact, controlling access to guns can reduce suicides, domestic killings and other violence stemming from momentary decisions in all age groups.
Dana Carroll, Salt Lake City