Lessons Learned:
[note: hyperlinked material shows in dark blue]
November 15, 2020 marked the one-year anniversary of Shattered: The Gun Accident Journal. There are now more than 366 daily reports in the archive, categorized by state and tagged for common safety issues. There are also five chronological narratives that illustrate the steady accumulation of family and community trauma that the daily accident reports, read individually, only hint at.
Because the journal summarizes available news stories, each individual daily report, taken separately, is insubstantial. Most lack important details and nuances that are unavailable in the media. Often, even the victim’s name is unreported. The disposition of the resulting accident-related charges of recklessness, negligence and delinquency also remain obscure. And in almost every case, many relevant circumstances of the accidents described, including, most importantly, the intensity of the follow-on sorrow and trauma are missing.
The point of the journal, however, is that the incidents, taken together, shed light on a hidden national calamity. The journal provides an illustration, like a Chuck Close portrait, of the problem of gun accidents in the United States: children shooting and killing themselves or other children; frightened men shooting their wives in the night believing them to be intruders; people out celebrating New Year’s Eve suddenly felled by a stray bullet; and bored teenagers at parties playing with a gun that no one knew was loaded. The unintended consequences of normalizing gun use across the country are an inescapable aspect of American life.
None of the accidents described here are the inevitable product of fate. Each of them could have been prevented with proper attention to gun safety, to child access prevention, and to safer gun designs.
- Prevalence
There are better places than this Journal to get data and statistics about unintended gun violence and gun accidents. Certainly, not every accident is reported in the media. And many of the thousands of media reports listed daily in the remarkably comprehensive Gun Violence Archive are not summarized here.
Nevertheless, a few things emerge in this journal when dry gun accident data is turned into a daily flesh and blood account.
For one, it is clear that horrific reported accidents happen most often in states that have lax gun laws, including especially those with weak child access prevention laws. Although there is at least one report in the archive from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, here are the top ten states listed by number of reports:
- Texas – 35
- Florida – 31
- Ohio – 30
- Michigan – 29
- North Carolina – 20
- Georgia — 19
- South Carolina – 19
- Pennsylvania – 18
- Alabama – 18
- Indiana – 17
Taken together, accidents in these 10 states comprise more than half of the archive.
Second, it is astonishing just how often children find loaded guns and use them accidentally to harm themselves or others. The archive includes 127 reports of the death of children over the last year. Here are just a handful of representative stories:
Third, people minding their own business can be sudden victims of someone else’s argument. Stories about reported innocent bystander shootings can be found here. It is unclear from these reports whether the shooter, who may have felt justified when shooting at an enemy or a rival, feels remorse when instead they kill or maim a child, a neighbor, a young mother, or a member of their own family.
2. Reporting
The reports in this journal include no more information than is reported in their underlying local sources. Reporters and their editors across the country, typically working for small local news outlets, make daily decisions about which gun accidents are worth covering and about how much investigative time to invest in each story. It is obvious from the news stories covered here that reporters are often frustrated by a dearth of reportable information in the aftermath of a catastrophic incident. Plainly, law enforcement officers, in the interest of privacy or based on the need to protect ongoing investigations, frequently withhold important details about the circumstances of accidents.
In many instances, stories are updated as more information becomes available, but, even then, details are typically lacking. Information concerning how a child obtained a gun is rarely available. And when the shooter remains alive after another is shot, there is rarely information about important questions of gun safety including: the level of safety training the shooter had; the circumstances in which the trigger was engaged (if at all); the basis on which the shooter believed the gun was unloaded; whether drugs or alcohol were involved, and the source of the gun. More information would be useful in formulating improved public policy approaches to gun safety.
Perhaps equally importantly, many media reports of gun accidents are essentially “bloodless.” Either they are so short that they reflect a depressing awareness of the all too common occurrence of deadly gun accidents or they ignore the follow-on agony and trauma of an accident for families and friends. Rarely, for example, when a parent accidentally shoots their own child, is the parent’s anguish or shame treated as a subject of the story. Nor do we learn much about how a sibling manages the traumatic aftermath of shooting a brother or sister. Reporters might sometimes consider follow-up stories that help their readers understand the emotional consequences of reported incidents.
3. Defective Guns and Gun Design Defects
Sadly, available media reports generally do not shed light on tragedies that are caused, in whole or in part, by unsafe gun designs. However, reporting does show that many accidental shootings take place in circumstances that reflect lack of awareness about whether a gun is loaded. Many others occur in circumstances in which its fair to infer that the accident was facilitated by lack of an external manual safety and/or by trigger pull weight low enough that a two-year-old can fire the gun.
a. Loaded Chamber Indicators
Gun manufacturers and some gun owners have resisted requirements that every gun have a clear indicator to show whether there is a round in the chamber ready to be fired. A common argument is that gun safety requires that shooters always check the chamber when using a gun. It is clear, however, that this safety requirement is honored in the breach in a variety of circumstances, particularly by younger gun users and those with minimal training. For example, there are multiple gun accidents that occur when guns are being cleaned, accidents that a loaded chamber would almost certainly help prevent. Similarly, accidents often take place when guns are inspected, handled, or passed around in circumstances that suggest that the shooter is unaware that the gun is loaded.
Those responsible for gun accidents often claim that they were not aware that their gun was loaded after an accident occurs. Their culpability for negligence, recklessness or even intentional murder would be much easier to determine if the gun had a clear indicator that it held a round in the chamber when it was fired.
Ultimately, it is almost impossible to conceive of a good reason not to mandate prominent loaded chamber indicators on every gun. Indeed, use of a gun in emergency self-defense may not provide time to check the chamber. Even experienced gun users presumably would sometimes rely on a safety indicator to let them know that their gun is loaded.
b. Manual Safety Disconnects
Similarly, inexperienced gun users rarely understand that guns without a manual safety disconnect can fire a round left in the chamber when the ammunition magazine is being changed or when it is removed from the gun. A safety that engages automatically when the magazine is not present would prevent the resulting accidents. Absent a magazine safety disconnect, that round is also more likely to fire if the gun is dropped. Gun users should not be left to guess whether there is a round in the chamber when the magazine is not present.
c. External Manual Safeties
All guns should have an external manual safety lever. Turning the safety on would then prevent the gun from firing. A safety lever makes it far less likely that the gun will fire if the trigger is accidentally pulled, including by children too young to understand how the gun works. Relatedly, many accidents would be prevented if every gunshot required two conscious choices (one to switch off the safety and the other to pull the trigger).
d. Minimum Trigger Pull Requirements
The number of accidents that occur when toddlers find a loaded gun shocks the conscience. Although gun locks and storage protocols (discussed below) are obviously the most important way to prevent these accidents, gun safety standards should also be required to mandate a trigger pull that make it difficult or impossible for a toddler to manipulate the trigger of a gun. There is no reason for guns to be manufactured with trigger pulls so light that they can routinely be fired by children under five years old. Massachusetts, for example, already requires that all handguns be designed with features designed to prevent young children from firing them.
e. Oversight by Regulators
Given the number of accidents that result from gun defects, and the tragic public safety consequences of those defects, regulation of consumer product safety of firearms is an essential government function. It is thus essential to repeal the protections that guns currently have from consumer product safety regulation so that government officials can participate in setting standards that will make guns safer. For example, government design specifications and pre-market testing, if properly enforced, would help assure that guns rarely, if ever, fire accidentally when the trigger is not pulled or when they are dropped.
Similarly, a governmental entity should have authority to investigate consumer complaints about defective guns that fire when being holstered or when they are dropped or which go off, for any reason, when the trigger is not pulled. Because defective guns affect public safety, government actors should be empowered to mandate gun recalls and to oversee the effectiveness of recall-related remedies. Notice procedures for gun owners whose guns may be defective are in particular need of overhaul.
4. Safe Storage and Child Access Prevention
Children find guns regularly. Safe storage requirements are intended to prevent theft and to make it less likely that children and other irresponsible or untrained persons come into possession of the gun. The sheer number of child deaths, suicides and injuries make safe storage laws essential public policy. Guns are dangerous instruments, that, put simply, cannot safely be left lying around.
In addition to safe storage requirements, state and federal gun laws should protect against the types of accidents that inevitably occur when children gain access to guns. Safety protections should include not only criminal sanctions for negligently or recklessly allowing an unsupervised minor access to a gun, but, as discussed above, requirements that manufacturers make guns that cannot be fired by small children.
Many states criminalize the negligence or recklessness associated with leaving a loaded gun where children can find it. In Virginia, for example, it is a misdemeanor to “recklessly leave a loaded, unsecured firearm in such a manner as to endanger the life or limb of any child under the age of fourteen.” This type of law is almost always going to be applied after a child has found a gun and has accidentally harmed herself or others. Better laws focus on prevention rather than only on punishment after the fact.
5. Weaknesses in Safety Rules and Safety Training
Many gun advocates and gun organizations like to say that virtually all gun accidents are caused by the shooter. For example, they point out that under widely published safety rules, a person using a gun should always ascertain, by opening the chamber, whether their gun is loaded. In addition, safety rules make clear that guns should always be pointed in a safe direction.
The reports in this journal make clear that these important safety rules are often forgotten or ignored in a variety of contexts. One reason, of course, is that not all gun owners are thoroughly trained to follow the rules. Pre-purchase safety training and live shooting should be required for all gun owners, rather than just for law enforcement officers. Periodic requalification should also be required. Training protocols should be studied to determine their effectiveness and evidence based curricula should be implemented wherever possible.
At present, in many states (particularly where there is no license prerequisite to gun ownership), there is no requirement that gun buyers participate in any pre-purchase safety training whatsoever (or such training is limited to requirements for obtaining a permit to carry the gun outside the home). Other states require only in-class training, without a requirement for safety training that requires handling or shooting a gun. Even in some states with strong gun laws, it is possible to obtain a firearm without ever having fired a gun.
Clearly, even in states that require relatively rigorous firearm training, people who have never had safety training will sometimes have access to guns, either with or without permission. In other cases, guns are used in circumstances in which nerves, alcohol or drugs are likely to push safety rules into the background. Safety rules need to be mandated for all gun owners, clearly taught, ubiquitous in gun culture, and strictly followed.
Conclusion
This journal demonstrates that gun accidents are an everyday fact of life. We need to learn from the tragedy and trauma inherent in stories like those collected here.
There is no reason that gun safety should not properly be a joint priority of gun owners, government regulators, medical providers, law enforcement, and gun violence prevention advocates. It is long past time to develop a common, practical strategy to reduce preventable gun deaths and catastrophic injuries.