TUESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2024

14-year-old Boy Dies After Unintentionally Shooting Himself

Inside a house in Darby, Pennsylvania, a 14-year-old boy accidentally shot himself in the abdomen while handling a gun. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. Police are questioning family members in the home and would not say who the gun belonged to. “We need to be more careful with leaving our firearms unattended in houses and residences,” said the police chief.

Source:

Mike DeNardo, “Darby Borough Police: Shooting Death of 14-year-old Boy Appears to Have Been Accidental,”audacy.com (August 14, 2024).

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From the Archives

WHEN A SIX-YEAR-OLD SHOOTS A TEACHER
There has been substantial media coverage about an incident on January 6, 2023 in which a six-year-old Newport News, Virginia boy brought a loaded Taurus pistol to school and shot his first-grade teacher. According to some reports, the teacher, Abigail Zwerner, ushered her other students to safety after being shot. Fortunately, Ms. Zwerner, though seriously injured, appears likely to survive.

The Taurus pi stol used in the incident belonged to the boy’s mother, who had legally purchased it. To date, there has been little reporting about how and where the gun was stored in the boy’s home.

Remarkably, there was a similar incident in Michigan in 2000, when a 6-year old brought a gun to school and deliberately shot and killed six-year-old Kayla Rolland, another student in his first-grade class.

Law enforcement authorities investigating the recent incident have sparked a national debate by stating that the child’s actions constituted an “intentional shooting” and by taking the boy “into custody.” This incorrectly implied to some that the relevant authorities believed the six-year-old to be criminally culpable.

The inevitable result was that many commentators focused on the obvious inability of a six-year-old to formulate criminal intent. Others made the incident an excuse for a renewed call for magnetometers to be placed in elementary schools across the country to screen children and their backpacks on the way into school. (Note: Recent reports indicate that based on a tip, the boy’s backpack had actually been searched on the day of the incident and nothing had been found.)

Given the ongoing allure of guns to children, these issues distract from larger and equally important questions about our state and national gun policies:
- Why don’t we have safe storage laws that would prevent children from discovering unattended loaded guns in thei r homes or in the family car. Most importantly, kids should never have access to unattended guns.
- Why do we allow gun manufacturers to design and manufacture guns that lack the type of basic safety features that would prevent an average six-year-old from using them. Guns should have integrated locks, a trigger pull heavy enough to prevent a young child from firing them, and an external manual safety that is difficult for a child to manipulate.
- Why does the criminal negli gence of a parent who allows their child to have access to a loaded gun act as a shield for gun manufacturers from liability in connection with an obvious design defe ct: manufacturing and marketing pistols that even a child can fire.
Regulators need to take re sponsibility for gun design and gun safety requirements that both prevent children from gaining access to guns and prevent children from firing those guns when they do gain access.

We’ve written extensively about each of these basic gun safety issues elsewhere at the hyperlinks provided. Suffice to say that once again this was a preventable tragedy that our lax gun laws failed to prevent.

Shattered – The Gun Accident Journal

14-year-old Boy Dies After Unintentionally Shooting Himself

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