I
was in 7th grade when I learned of the death of a classmate due to
an accidental shooting. He and a
friend were cleaning out a neighbor’s garage when they came across the loaded
gun; the friend accidently shot him while handling it. It was shocking. A 12 year old, someone my age who I had
gone to school with, was gone. I
didn’t know him especially well, but he seemed great. He was usually smiling and worked hard at school and I think
I remember him playing soccer. I
couldn’t imagine how his family was feeling, or the friend, or the neighbor.
Guns
have been in the news a lot lately- deliberate violence, accidental deaths, new
laws, and 3D printing. However,
one article particularly has been on my mind, “Another ‘accidental’ childshooting shows that child shooting deaths are not accidental”*. It isn’t suggesting that children are
being shot deliberately, but that these deaths are preventable and shouldn’t
simply be treated as isolated tragedies. This made me reflect on my own experience. I know a lot of gun owners who feel
more secure because they have a gun in their home; however, I’ve never met a
person who has protected his home from danger using a firearm, but I did know a child who died in an accident with a gun. As I started searching for more information I came across an
analysis/article about “unintentional shootings of Utah children” that found
that there were “250 unintentional shootings or children by children in Utah
between 1988 and 2003, or about 16 per year”.
I
want to come to a conclusion, a poignant observation about what we should be
doing, but it is complicated. It's frustrating- it is complicated but the answer is not to do nothing. It is so frustrating to me how it feels like, excuse the expression, a loaded conversation whenever "guns" and "regulation" are in the same sentence. But it seems absolutely crazy that we aren't doing more to keep people safe- we regulate cars, drugs, and many other things that contribute to the overall public safety of our country. I'm not proposing anything specific, but the first step is to be open to the conversation. The current system isn't working, let's try and change it.
*The author of this article recently posted a follow up:
“Another day, another ‘accidental’ child shooting death”.
