Accidental Gun Deaths Involving Children Are A Major Problem In The US
It was a gorgeous Sunday in March when Misty Uribe’s son watched one of his neighborhood friends accidentally shoot another in the face, she said. As Uribe, 30, sat in her Mooresville, North Carolina, home, never did she think the 8-year-old boy next door would find a loaded rifle in his family shed, take it outside during a game of cops and robbers, and fire it at another boy, she said.
“He was shaking from head to toe,” Uribe said of her son after he returned from playing outside. “He kept saying, ‘So and so shot so and so with a gun.’ I absolutely did not think it was real; I thought it was a Nerf gun or a BB gun, and he just kept saying, ‘No, Mommy, it was a real gun.’”
The victim lived — the bullet entered the boy's cheekbone and exited behind his ear — and the experience changed Uribe's outlook on how to approach gun safety. “I could literally hear him screaming with the door shut, standing in my front yard,” Uribe said, recalling the shooting.
By the end of 2015, about 265 children under 18 picked up a firearm and shot someone by accident, and 83 of those shootings were fatal, according to research compiled by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. Some 41 of those deaths involved the shooters themselves, and most of the shootings involved toddlers or teens who were playing recklessly with the guns.
Nearly 1.7 million children live in households where guns are stored either loaded or not locked away, according to the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. This makes American children 16 times more likely to be unintentionally killed by a gun, compared with similar countries.
