3-year old Amir Antoine of Baton Rouge, Louisiana shot and killed himself Saturday morning in his home.  He was handling a gun and accidentally pulled the trigger. 

This was the second accidental shooting in the Antoine home in the last four years.  In 2016, 17-year-old Ahmad Antoine was charged with negligent homicide after he accidentally fired a shotgun and killed another teen.

Reports also noted that Antoine’s shooting was not the only accidental shooting affecting a child in Baton Rouge this weekend. On Friday, a five-year old shot himself in the hand. 

“No matter how high you put a gun or no matter how well you’ve think you’ve hidden it, if it’s not locked up [children] are probably going to find it,” Baton Rouge gun expert Benjamin Moore said. “People usually get a gun in order to protect children so it’s a big disaster if the tool you got to protect them ends up killing them.”

Moore also says that his organization offers free classes for parents and children. Moore says when kids are educated on guns “its not a toy now. They understand that it takes away the mysticism of the gun and they realize it can be a destructive tool.”

The NRA promotes gun safety training for children, but an empirical study has found that gun safety programs for kids actually make it more likely, rather than less, that children will play with a gun if they find it in an unsupervised setting.

Sources:

WBRZ Staff, “Coroner: 3-year-old Accidentally Shot, Killed Himself,” WBRZ2 (January 28, 2020).

Kennedi Walker, “BRPD Reminds Residents of Gun Safety Amid Deadly Weekend,” brproud.com (January 27, 2020).