…Then what do you have to say about this:
A 2-year-old girl died Saturday afternoon after she found a loaded handgun and accidentally shot herself, Fayetteville police said. [via]
This latest report is not an anomaly. Leaving aside malice — murder and random mayhem; leaving aside adult folly, when individuals supposedly at or past the age of reason self-nominate for Darwin awards; leaving aside the great gaping hole in families all over the country left by suicide-by-gun; kids, guns, and accidental deaths offer a blunt and clear test. A neighbor said of this kid that she was “a 2-year-old baby who hasn’t even lived yet.” So are they all.
If you think of the defenceless as deserving of special care…if you think that kids are the fit objects of national attention, of such importance that we must enact a rule of law so that such innocent lives may be absolutely protected…then what are you willing to do about the guns?
Let me be clear: I know that plenty of people who oppose abortion are horrified by American gun law and culture, and I honor that. But lots do not, and there is a pretty fair correlation between the states that have the most restrictive abortion laws and the most relaxed legal framework for guns. Those are the folks, those are the legislatures that I’m talking about.
Let me be clearer: my deepest sympathy goes to the family who just lost a daughter. Doesn’t matter what their politics are. Doesn’t even matter to me what their role in the sequence of events that led to this little girl finding that weapon. Their hell is with them now and there’s nothing I can or would wish to do to make it worse. It can’t get worse.*
I’ll even admit that pointing to (what seems to me to be) a glaring inconsistency between anti-abortion politics and concern for the living is something of a cheap shot in this context. The issue here is guns and the way some Americans have created a culture in which minimal moves to safer gun regimes are seen as the ultimate in tyranny. That’s what has to be confronted head on.
But I can tell you that I’m heartsick at reading story after story of babies killing babies or themselves. And if you think children are actually something other than little adults, that they do need special attention, protection, care — and I do — then, yeah, I do think its fair to ask anyone who presumes to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves “where do you stand?”
That’s it. I got nothing more on this. I keep thinking about my boy when he was two and what I would felt had I found him on the floor…
Can’t bear it.
*This isn’t to say that I don’t favor criminal negligence charges against anyone who leaves a gun where a kid can get at it. That’s a social sanction, and it is vital that we as a society make it consequential to own a gun. There’s reason they call it “deterrence.” But as an individual? I would never say to someone in this family’s position how sinfully dumb it is to keep a loaded gun anywhere near a kid. They know
Image: English School, Portrait of a Dead Child, 1624.
Cain
My thoughts go out to the parents whose child died. I hope they earn a valuable lesson about gun safety. It’s too bad that someone had to die. I hope they will recover from this incident.
schrodinger's cat
The portrait of a dead child is seriously creepy, I need to unsee it. I am going to have nightmares now.
Cassidy
They knew beforehand. They just chose to believe they were special and that they were “responsible” gun owners and that only bad gun owners had negligent discharges and death(s).
Tom Levenson
@schrodinger’s cat: Good. That’s mah point.
Chyron HR
Oh, now you’ve done it. Beloved Balloon Juice regular “Glockman” is going to have a sad.
WereBear
I follow a lot of exQuiverful & exFundie sites, and a great many of them relate that their liberation often began with their realization of exactly the stark hypocrisy Tom has written about here.
People are supposed to be valuable; not treated as political pawns.
Hawes
Pro-life is just a matter of timing. They’re only pro-life until the child is born, then fuck’em.
This has been true since approximately ever.
Botsplainer
@Cain:
I’d rather they go to prison, for decades, in a cell festooned with photographs of the child and the pistol, as a lesson to other dipshits with guns (most especially the white ones who always seem to get cut slack on this stuff).
Redshirt
Only the 2nd Amendment prevents more dead 2 year olds. #Arm_the_children!
Botsplainer
One more thing, cheap mercy accomplishes nothing.
? Martin
I don’t understand why cases like this aren’t tried as homicides. Was there intent? I’d say yes. Leaving a loaded gun around a 2 year old is little different from putting poison in their sippy cup and leaving it on the table for them to find.
Redshirt
An upstanding American, and Mainer!
schrodinger's cat
@Tom Levenson: But I has no has guns or kidlets.
PurpleGirl
For many years accidents and deaths caused by drunk drivers and those driving under the influence were basically pooh-poohed as just part of life. Then a bunch of mothers who had lost children in DUI-caused accidents decided the situation had to change. And that social sanctions had to be real, consequential, and meaningful.
I think the situation is analogous to children dying from gun-shot from a gun left where anyone could get it. Yes, parents should feel it for a long time, but I think there has to be a social sanction, something consequential and meaningful to say to others — If you leave a loaded gun where your 4-year-old can get it, you need to spend some time in jail and to learn just how stupid they are. They can cry over their lost child while in jail.
Cain
@Botsplainer:
I think the guy is already in a special hell as it is. But sure, I suppose we could go all biblical on him. Doing this is not going to reach every asshole with a gun however. Just this guy who shot his kid and has to bury her due to his own negligance. It’s a pretty powerful message.
ExurbanMom
I feel like what we’ve learned from all the mass murders with guns of late (theater shooting in Colorado, shooting of school children in Connecticut) is this: the price of the 2nd amendment is the death of innocent people, in large numbers, frequently.
The End.
This should be completely wrong and unsupportable. This should not be allowable. But we as a society have deemed it so, as we have not risen up and required reasonable gun safety policies. We have not risen up and said “those huge clips and magazines that allow one assailant to mass murder all by themselves? NO.” We are allowing this. It is wrong.
Botsplainer
@Cain:
The stupid fuck can cry about his loss in custody. It isn’t like he’s going to be worth a shit to anybody anyway – he may as we’ll be in custody and gunless.
Cervantes
But as an individual? I would never say to someone in this family’s position how sinfully dumb it is to keep a loaded gun anywhere near a kid.
It takes a village — to raise a child, or to kill it. These parents may have been idiots — but sure as shootin’ this will happen again, and soon — so what’s our excuse?
Cervantes
@ExurbanMom: You said it more eloquently, and earlier, than I did.
leeleeFL
@PurpleGirl: This is possibly the best suggestion. MADD has made a difference. It took time and the problem is not solved but there is improvement. Ifthe same sanctions were available in gun deaths things might change.
? Martin
@Cain:
Powerful enough to result in Americans buying more guns and more ammo each year.
fuckwit
@Cain: This reminds me a lot of the post about rape and alcohol. Yes, it is possible to both condemn the societal causes of the problem AND to have deep sympathy for the victim, at the same time. We can do this. We have to be able to do this.
An individual tragedy is to be met with sympathy for the victim(s). A societal problem is an enemy that must be defeated with extreme prejudice. Even though one causes the other, they are different things, and require different attitudes and approaches.
I want gun safety laws passed: mandatory background checks (even at gun shows), mandatory locked gun safes in homes and/or requirements (or subsidies, paid for with taxes on guns) for shooting ranges to have secure lockers available as an alternative. I want rapists prosecuted, and stronger laws and tougher sentencing specifically for those raping inebriated or incapacitated victims. There are lots of things we can do to prevent these kinds of tragedies.
We can do these things without blaming victims who ultimately were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like we or our loved ones could have been.
Betty Cracker
@Botsplainer: Gratuitous retribution isn’t very productive either. Some sort of societal sanction makes sense, but decades in prison for an accident, even one caused by hideous negligence? That doesn’t make much sense to me.
fuckwit
@ExurbanMom: This is the best thing I’ve ever read on that topic: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/dec/15/our-moloch/
Cassidy
This fight has been lost. Dead children are the new reality, sacrifices to the gods of ignorance and absolutism. The only way we get control is when these assholes try to take by force what they can’t get through elections and they have to be forcibly disarmed.
Kay
@? Martin:
They’re charged with negligent homicide in Ohio, which is a first degree misdemeanor with a max sentence of 180 days.
It’s nuts. Makes absolutely no sense. You know those “hot car” cases? Where parents believe they have taken a (usually sleeping, back seat) child to day care but are distracted and accidentally leave them in the car, go into work, and the child dies of heat?
Half of those parents are charged with a felony
They don’t have a ridiculously powerful industry lobby, of course.
Citizen Alan
@Cain:
Why do you think that? Seriously, why do you think that just because you would be overcome and crippled by remorse if your own negligence led to the death of your child that some gun masturbator who knowingly kept loaded guns within the reach of small children would feel the same? I think it’s just as likely that the parents have already rationalized to themselves that “it just happened” and it was no one’s fault. Assuming they’re in some kind of “personal hell” is as silly as thinking George Zimmerman would ever feel a second of guilt over what he did to Trayvon Martin.
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker:
Would you feel the same if he’d run over a child while driving through a residential neighborhood at 80 mph? The definition of negligent homicide, IIRC, is “evincing gross negligence or wanton disregard for the safety of others that leads to the death of another” or words to that effect. Personally, I think the absolute best thing we could do to curb accidental gun deaths is treat them as strict liability crimes for which the negligent gun owner is wholly responsible.
PopeRatzo
Yes, they know how sinfully irresponsible it is to keep a loaded gun anywhere near a kid. And they just don’t care.
Because their gun in the abstract is more important to them than their children in the flesh. I’ll bet there is a significant number of people who would tell you that if the price of gun ownership is the death of one of their children, that they would still choose the gun. Because it has been brilliantly and cynically marketed as a symbol of strength and liberty and power and most important, suppression of the desperate fear that consumers gun “activists”. .
scav
@schrodinger’s cat: You’re a citizen and member of society. Non-involvement isn’t an option, and looking away so as not to trouble you mind is making a choice. Doesn’t have to be highest on your list of priorities, but a refusal to be at least troubled by such things strikes me as a little off. (I don’t think you are, but that thing about not having guns or kids was a little too flippant for me tonight.)
? Martin
@Kay:
I have a colleague that happened to. His wife had put the baby in the back of her car as the two of them were leaving the house, and for one reason or another they decided to swap cars at the last minute. There was a mention of ‘you’ll have to drop off at day care’ that wasn’t heard in the shuffle, and dad drove to work with a sleeping baby in the back seat. A coworker spotted the baby at lunchtime – a small parking lot with space for only about 10 cars, so little foot traffic nearby. It was too late.
Felony charges were filed, but were dropped. Had they not been white with PhDs, I’m not sure the charges would have been dropped. But you know – people in suits care about their kids more than people that work food service.
? Martin
@Betty Cracker:
Buying the gun wasn’t an accident, nor likely even a necessity. Loading the gun was even less of an accident or necessity. Leaving it about might have been an accident, but a lot of deliberate decisions led into this situation.
Betty Cracker
@Citizen Alan: I think it should be a liability crime. I’m just not on board with jailing someone for decades in a cell decorated with pictures of their dead child. That sort of thinking made the US the world’s largest jailer.
Kay
@? Martin:
The cases are heartbreaking. In one, the father struggled to get the gun off the police officer who responded so he could kill himself.
It’s usually because they somehow varied their morning routine; stopped to buy something, left early or late, or switched cars, like in yours.
I don’t know why they’re treated differently than the gun cases. That doesn’t make sense to me.
Betty Cracker
@? Martin: Hence the use of the word “negligence.”
pseudonymous in nc
I’d like to think that you prosecute in order to save the next child. But if you saw the NYT story on the families of the victims of non-malicious shootings (I refuse to say ‘accidental’ here) then you see how the feedback loop is broken has been broken by years of NRA propaganda.
Responsible Gun Owners™ are Responsible Gun Owners™ until something terrible happens, at which point they are declared never to have been Responsible Gun Owners™ at all, so Responsible Gun Owners™ shouldn’t take anything from it.
And since you can’t sue gun makers or gun sellers for putting child-killing bangtoys in homes, you can’t create that deterrent either.
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
I don’t think it’s exactly analogous, and in a way that makes change harder. The moms who founded MADD could reasonably blame others for their kids deaths. If a third party drunk caused the accident, they could claim that person was responsible. If the kids themselves were drunk, they were obviously responsible. In neither case was it primarily the parents’ fault, so they could go on a crusade that didn’t wind up pointing fingers back at their own misbehavior. That is not at all true of this kind of accidental gun death, where it is usually the parents’ fault for leaving around a loaded weapon where kids could find it. That placing of the blame is exactly why you have active pressure groups composed of relatives of murder victims but not the relatives of gun accident victims.
Kay
And so safety training probably isn’t enough with kids and guns:
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,129342,00.html
Betty Cracker
@pseudonymous in nc: All good points. The technology exists to put an end to accidental (non-malicious, whatever you want to call it) shootings right now. The gun industry wont allow it. I’d rather focus on loosening their hold on congresses’ nads than increasing punishment for stupid parents.
Redshirt
Pro Life should be Vegan, also too.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Which shouldn’t be surprising, given that they’re kids. We know that plenty of adults who ought to know better wind up killing or maiming themselves with guns because they do stupid things with them. Why should we expect that kids would do any better?
Jamey
Sorry, no sympathy for the parents. They knew the dangers and what was at stake, yet still kept a loaded gun within reach of a toddler. I hope their lives are ruined, the bastards.
Another Holocene Human
Check out rawstory, Alex Jones held a disgusting
white supremacist nostalgia terror reenactmentgun nut rally at the Alamo. Just for context, the Alamo is in San Antonio, which is a Spanish-speaking Catholic Mexican city surrounded by shitty gringo exburbs and shitkicker Baptist colonies in the distant hills. (Church down one direction, drinking AND dancing at the scary dive down the other.) It’s literally the only town in the continental US where I’ve visited–including Miami Beach–where I felt as if I were abroad.The Alamo has become one of those “lost cause” symbols for dead-ender white supremacists. The projection is incredibly thick, with Jones characterizing his thug ancestors who started a war of secession from Mexico in order to continue their immoral criminal rackets with less interference as fighters against “bullies”.
This is meant to send a message to uppity Chicanos who would rally behind local heroes like the Castro brothers to gain an edge in Texas politics, to take back through peaceful means some of the political and social power denied them so long by force.
There’s a major US Armed Forces base in San Antonio. Hmm. Like Rammstein, a little “reminder”?
zoot
my sympathies are with the dead child, criminally abused by her parents – who are too fucking stupid to be entrusted with the care of their own child.
Cassidy
@Another Holocene Human: There is more than one. The two major ones are training bases.
Another Holocene Human
This map is a heatmap of the probable locations of Neo-Confederate dead-enders.
Note that Western Tenn and Kenfucky (very racist place) and even a bit of Mizzou are not immune.
There also is an outline of today’s Black Belt and the Mississippi which apparently carted future D voter generations north along the Western branch going by the 2012 county map :DDD
Of course rather than pin it on the waterway I am going to claim it was the railroad, it certainly seemed that way, however the railroad veers East through Central IL and those Dem counties follow the IL boarder West. Sorry, so much for my great civilizing IC line theory.
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
There is something absolutely mind boggling about the people who worship the story of the Alamo and the Texas War of Independence then turning around and bitching about the dangers of “illegal immigration.”
p
another venue would allow me to fan and favorite you.
i am so impressed by thoughtful, heart inspired intelligence
Another Holocene Human
Some of those D counties may be “northern accented” port of New Orleans Catholic immigrants who started in the urban Catholic community in NOLA and gradually moved inland–the river was much more important for transportation than the RRs during the 19th century when these folks got off the boat.
(It’s not actually a northern accent, they just seem to have given English the same phonetic shifts and cadence their cousins who got off in New York did or those who traveled the St Lawrence seaway west to Chicago–neither Southern nor Creole nor Cajun)
I’m spinning bits and pieces together here-let me know if I’m really off the mark.
Another Holocene Human
@Cassidy: You don’t say…
Anne Laurie
Thanks for posting this, Tom. I’ve been sitting, like a coward, on some Further Reading:
Cassidy’s right — it’s not just stupid, uneducated, ghetto/white trash parents who have these “accidents”. Thirty-some years ago, friends-of-a-friend in our college community “lost” their two-year-old when the five-year-old got up early and found Daddy’s loaded gun in the coffee table. The grieving parent’s solution was to move the loaded gun to a “safer” place — their nightstand. Where, of course, the five-year-old would never be able to access it unsupervised. (P.S. Yes, there was also a newborn in the family… )
PurpleGirl and Kay are also right: This kind of feckless carelessness needs to be socially stigmatized. Look, most of us over forty remember travelling in cars, even the front seat, without seatbelts. People brought their newborns home with Mom cradling the infant in the “shotgun” seat. These days, that would be unthinkable — even teenage parents know better, and would never permit their friends to treat leaving an infant unsecured as “just one of those things”. (Same with drunk driving; it hasn’t been eradicated, but even teenagers know it’s stupid & dangerous, and nobody old enough to be drinking legally would make a joke of doing so.)
Having an unsecured gun in a house where kids live/visit needs to be stigmatized the same way. “You left your gun in the nightstand? On the closet shelf, next to your porn collection? Heck if I’m letting my kids come over to your house again, you moron! What kind of backwoods shanty did you grow up in, that you think that kind of ‘parenting’ is okay! And here we thought you were respectable!…” Shame can be a more powerful weapon than any amount of official rule-making.
Punchy
Can we please have a non-dead children thread/discussion? Kthxbye
Groucho48
Every month Kos has a Diary about “accidental” shootings. Kids finding guns in their house and shooting themselves or someone else. People shooting themselves or someone else while cleaning their gun. People shooting themselves or someone else while showing off their gun. There is usually a shooting during a gun safety lecture. 30-40-50 incidents every month. And those are just what the diarist is able to find on his own. No one in government collects data on this.
If a non-relative is the victim, or, if there was alcohol involved, the gun owner is often charged, Otherwise, he (it’s almost always a he) isn’t charged.
I think anytime something like that happens, the owner should be charged and face some kind of prison. Even if only 3-6 months. It should also be enough of a crime that they lose the right to vote or to have any firearms.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Mark S.
@Cassidy:
When nothing changed after all of the dead first graders at Newtown, I pretty much gave up any hope for this fucking idiotic country.
Violet
If someone drives drunk and gets caught, they not only get punished by law, but their insurance rates go up. Homeowners insurance rates, renters insurance rates and maybe even health insurance rates should go up for people who own guns and especially if their loaded gun was used to injure or harm someone, like in this situation. Make it expensive to own a gun.
Cain
@fuckwit:
I agree completely. I’m going to do the human thing and sympathesize but I will work to drive tougher laws so that we don’t have these tragedies. People are going to fight it, but it’s the best thing for everyone. Through his idiocy that parent stole his child’s life. He’ll have to live with that. Hopefully, he will also be behind those who are trying to solve this problem. Guns should be respected and you need to put as much paranoia taking care of them as you do with the government taking away your guns. It’s the only way you’ll keep government out of your business.
Cain
@Betty Cracker:
You said it better than I could. Maybe it’s a squishy liberal thing, but I don’t believe in absolute retribution. The man is going to do do jail time, but it’s not worth throwing him in jail and then throwing away the key. If that’s the case, we’re goign to be spending a lot of money incarcerating a lot of people.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
I usually skip these threads. Why? Because it doesn’t matter. Not one person is going to turn in their guns because a child killed herself, or himself, or someone else, with a gun that the child’s parents left laying around. Gun control is chimera. The fact that we on the left are outraged and write passionate comments about such incidents just makes the gun-happy more determined to hold on to their guns.
Fuck it, drive on.
Cain
@Citizen Alan:
I would like to assume the best not the worst. Consider it a coping mechanism to how I deal with the world.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Groucho48:
NO, NO, NO. We should not be contributing to right wingers’ campaign to restrict voting rights.
Ruckus
@Cain:
I agree with Citizen Allen here. If you have a working sense of morality you will feel bad about all the shootings. If you lack that sense you won’t. How many conservatives do I need to name to show this? His example of zimmerman is a perfect one. Not only was there not an iota of remorse displayed let alone felt, there probably never will be. Darth cheneny would be another prime example. Some people really do see the world differently and they act according to how they see it. They might be OK in the wilderness by themselves but it makes them dangerous in and to a society.
ETA And it really isn’t dealing with society. It may be dealing with yourself but in a society we need to be ever aware that people with no sense of morality exist. Always looking for the good in people is a nice exercise but it is doomed to failure in reality when so many have so little good to find.
Cain
@Mark S.:
Yeah, that was fucking sad. This country loves guns more than children. It’s understandable why people are angry enough to demand punishment. I guess we’ll keep on killing our kids until otherwise. (if we don’t kill them by guns, we’ll probably do it by sending them off to fucked up wars, or a slow death through PTSD)
Another Holocene Human
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set): Why? Because we make it all about banning assault weapons. Fuck that. Make people explain why it is so f***ing hard to fill out a little card every time you sell a gun on eBay or trade guns with your brother and file it where you transfer car titles? It prevents gun straw buyers from flooding urban areas with guns because, for one thing, it makes straw purchasing far easier to prosecute. “Enforce the laws we have” is the chimera because without simple shit like filing paperwork on these transfers the laws are more or less unenforceable and more kids die from intentional violence.
It’s hard to argue against filling out a little 3.5″x5″ card, no background checks, Homeland Security registration, or fee. Just a paper trail about where ye auld gunne has been.
Protects you when shit gets stolen, too, just like VINs on cars.
Another Holocene Human
Also in light of the Boston bombing why can’t we get tracers in black powder? A simple fix that makes no impact on the hunting community or even the “I gotta protect myself” sorts. Only the most paranoid survivalist CT would-be race war secession-mongers give a shriveled fig about tracers.
Cain
@Ruckus:
We know nothing about this man other than he was neglible. You and Citizen Allan is assuming as much as I am what kind of person he is. He could well have been against the shooting up of Newton and then fucked up this once.
Anne Laurie
@Violet:
Good point. Most home insurance companies, IIRC, require “dangerous dog” riders if the homeowner’s dog has bitten someone, and I’m perfectly okay with that. As someone else said, with great power comes great responsiblity!
Cain
@Anne Laurie:
This is a great idea. Insurance, and other things should go up. Make gun ownership a LOT more expensive in case they fuck up. Government won’t even be involved and the NRA has no power there.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Anne Laurie: That is a great idea.
Ruckus
@Another Holocene Human:
I agree that it would be nice to know how a gun got in the house so that the 2 yr old could get shot but really what is the point? The kid is still dead and we almost always know where the gun came from. The analogy with the car doesn’t add up, a car is large and to be at all useful has to be in public. That gun could sit on the table in the front room for years before anyone even knows about it and it is used to kill someone. A paper trail doesn’t stop that at all.
What has to happen is this country has to get over it’s illicit love affair with guns. Now not everyone is in love with them but too many are.
PurpleGirl
Punchy, I keep a kitten cam or two (or three) open on tabs so I can quickly click over to see kittens playing, sleeping, eating, whatever. I decided to read this thread tonight but I don’t always read these threads. Much more fun watching kitten cams. (I don’t have a cat but I am becoming a crazy cat lady.)
Groucho48
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
My thinking is that if the right starts feeling the consequences of its actions…disenfranchising millions of black folks because of often victim-less drug crimes, their /outrage and /whining might bring the whole issue into the public consciousness.
As it is now, this disenfranchisement isn’t even the smallest blip on the radar of any politician or mainstream pundit. Disenfranchise a couple million black males? Pffft…who cares? But, disenfranchise a good, salt of the earth white Christian male who had the terrible misfortune that his gun went off while he was cleaning it, something that could happen to anyone (anyone being defined as a gun nut), and the bullet hit a little girl next door? How could we take away his vote forever? There needs to be mercy and forgiveness! Let’s change this horrible law that takes away an American’s most precious right forever!
Well, I can dream, anyway.
But, while I understand what you are saying, it’s not as though they need any encouragement. They’ve been doing it for decades without a peep from anyone with the power to change it. Doing the same to gun nuts who harm someone won’t make things worse, but, it might at least get the whole issue a little more attention.
Chris
@Higgs Boson’s Mate (Crystal Set):
That was my reaction to the school shooting already. People are mad that nothing happened, but I was honestly surprised that the country even bothered to stir in its sleep to the extent that it did. Society has put gun violence victims all the way at the top of its “Things We Don’t Give A Shit About” list, with only “Human Rights In Palestine” ranking higher, and I honestly don’t see what it’ll take to change that.
badjim
Perhaps because I’ve inherited a small assortment of shotguns, I’ve gamed out home invasion scenarios and come to the conclusion that the guns would be useless locked up and unloaded. If you’re serious about having a gun for home defense, it’s going to be a threat to casual visitors, especially children. With perfect discipline the threat can be minimal, which is a bit like saying a good driver doesn’t need insurance.
The idea that having a gun keeps you safe is widely held; the fact that it doesn’t, in fact the reverse, does violence to our treasured traditions. This is going to be hard to turn around.
Maybe every parent whose gun caused the death of a child should be compelled to appear on national television. During the invasion of Iraq the death of every armed forces member was noted on the nightly news (well, PBS, anyway). Even if we couldn’t do this with every victim of gun violence, we could probably do it with children.
Ruckus
@Cain:
But he fucked up royally just this once. What difference does it make if he thought Newton was horrible? His kid is still dead. And it”s his fault. His kid could have grown up to be a drug addict or found a cure for cancer but he and we will never know. Because he is dead.
IOW I don’t care what kind of person he is. I care that his kid is dead and he is at fault. And that alone doesn’t get him any points in my book. Nothing else is really relevant.
Amir Khalid
For some in America, the Constitutionally-provided freedom to own a gun apparently includes freedom from legal consequences for its misuse. That’s hair-raising enough, but it’s especially hair-raising that this attitude can extend even to police and prosecutors — whose very job is all about public safety.
I’d agree that the US probably needs a MADD-style gun safety campaign. (I can even think of the perfect Stevie Wonder quote for it.) But such a campaign might need to spend more time than MADD did educating police and prosecutors; the former seem particularly inclined to firearms themselves.
Ash Can
Everybody who supports the Second Amendment at this point, the way it’s interpreted in this country, is guilty of this shit. Everybody.
The Second Amendment: Fix it or flush it.
Cain
@Ruckus:
OK, that’s fine. But we were discussing whether he would feel remorse or not. We don’t know, but personally I’m falling on the side of positive as opposed to negative. It’s a shitty thing that happened, and again he’s going to jail. He’ll get to think good and hard for quite some time about his actions. .
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
It might really surprise you how many cops don’t want everyone to have a gun. Especially one that can be used against them so easily. Any weapon actually, but guns for sure. And of course that number doesn’t come close to 100% of cops. But many of them realize the risk they face all the time from too many guns.
Cain
@Amir Khalid:
I think Anne Marie has the right of it. Make it hit their pocketbook. Let them writhe in the court of public toxicity. In teh end, we can’t depend on government here to do it. But we can make life toxic for these assholes socially.
Cain
@Ruckus:
Oh yeah, guns wont’ save you from the unpredictable. You never know when some random traffic stop means you’re putting your life in your hands. You have no idea what an unstable person will do with guns.
Ruckus
@Cain:
He’s going to jail? Well then that solves everything.
Sorry for the snark but I really don’t give a shit that he feels remorse. That’s nice of course but his kid is still fucking dead. And how sure are you that he is going to jail? Many parents in this situation never even get charged. They have suffered enough. I really don’t care if they suffer. Once again I care that an innocent child is fucking dead. And there isn’t any good reason that I can see for that.
And I am not going to be limited to discussing remorse when some idiot with a gun has a dead child.
patrick II
They don’t always know. I had a friend who’s brother left a loaded gun in the closet where his exploring five-year old found it and accidently shot himself. My friend’s brother decided it was God’s will.
rb
My friend’s brother decided it was God’s will.
Heh, people like that are proof God doesn’t exist. Or if he does he either, best case, doesn’t give a fuck or, more likely, is amused / aroused by the slaughter of children. So maybe it *was* His will after all.
wenchacha
I cannot imagine the horror for the parents. I would really like to see some brave PSAs featuring the survivors of gun accidents. If the friends and family of this couple shrug it off with “these things happen,” that would really bug me. These particular accidents would not happen if there wasn’t a gun in the home. Once you bring the gun in, you can institute safety measures, but failure is forever a possibility.
There would still be tragic accidents, no question. But we warn people about the dangers of cleaning solutions, dishwasher gel-paks, companies make alarms to keep you from backing over your kid in the driveway. Cribs get recalled, hoodies lose their ties, and toys are upsized to prevent choking. In all those cases, people pushed to make children safer. Fisher-Price probably had some lobbyists to bleat to a Senator or five, but they don’t have near the clout of the NRA.
Maybe it’s just a numbers game. When x number of people lose y number of people to gun accidents or gun violence, then the tide will turn. My worry is that the numbers have to be far higher before that happens.
Ash Can
Do we want gun violence to end in this nation or don’t we? That’s the bottom line.
Ash Can
Everything else is tap-dancing.
Amir Khalid
For everyone’s edification, a typical Slate take on California’s new gun storage law.
Ruckus
@wenchacha:
Numbers are not important. That should be obvious by now. Lives are not important. And that should be just as obvious. For the people who keep a loaded gun accessible, fear is important, self reliance is important and truth about guns as a safety device isn’t important.
Ruckus
@Ash Can:
This. A million times this.
Anne Laurie
@badjim:
Well, yeah, which is why insurance companies demand riders for customers keeping “dangerous” dogs (possibly also for home defence!)
I’m not for gun bans, I’m for gun safety. Guns are powerful tools, they’re not religious icons. No sensible adult would leave a charged chainsaw around where a two-year old or a twelve-year-old could “play” with it, or assume that the pitbull in the new house at the end of the block will be okay with your kid climbing into its yard, or leave Grammy’s collection of prescription meds sitting on the dining room table because ‘the kids should know those aren’t candy’. Anyone responsible enough to own a gun should be responsible enough to keep that gun from becoming a ‘public nuisance’!
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid:
It’s embarrassing to admit this, but for quite a few “Second Amendment defenders”, the ownership / display of guns is really a quasi-religious issue. They’re like our version of the Taliban, where they’ve grafted ancient tribal customs onto Sharia — just as some hyperreligious Muslims insist that “the Koran” demands men never cut their beards, or that heretics should be stoned, some Americans really really believe that “the Constitution” wants every citizen to be armed at all times, for (their understanding of) patriotism.
I’ve made a few Rationalist acquaintances angry by pointing out that you could replace “my gun” with “my bible” in their rants, and they’d be indistinguishable from the godbotherers they claim to disdain.
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
And of course we have child proof caps on meds now so they shouldn’t be able to eat them like candy.
As @badjim: pointed out an unloaded gun is useless for home defense. So is a gun in a safe. So almost any restriction on them make them useless. So any gun that would have any chance of being useful, even though they aren’t, is highly dangerous.
How do we square this circle?
badjim
@Anne Laurie:
Exactly. The problem is that a gun responsibly stored isn’t actually useful in some of the scenarios that people use to justify their ownership, and that’s not mentioning other common uses of firearms, like suicide and domestic violence. (When I’ve gamed it out I’ve concluded I’d be better off diving into the garage for the machete, and triggering the garage door opener as a diversion.)
The problem is that having a gun handy for emergencies is, in practice, difficult to distinguish from having it someplace a child might find it. My understanding is that the military has strict rules about disarming weapons before bringing them into camp because otherwise mistakes are inevitable.
Dogs are a lot more forgiving. You get a lot of deterrence for a few belly rubs. Mostly a lot of back scratching. Food, picking up poop, dealing with fleas. I’d like to say that they’re more discriminating than we are, but the one I love the most has entirely the wrong attitude towards skunks, and arguably exemplifies the problem. I don’t know if she thinks skunks are a threat, but she thinks it’s a good idea to kill them.
I think guns are neat. But they’re a solution to a problem we don’t have. I have a box of shotgun shells my Dad bought almost thirty years ago. When the thought occurred to me that they were most likely useless by now and ought to be replaced, I had to consider the likely fate of their replacements, languishing forever unfired as well. Of all the maintenance I’ve so far deferred, this has least challenged my core values.
Villago Delenda Est
@PopeRatzo:
They’ll say that’s not true, but they’re only lying to themselves when they do.
The gun fetish is more important to them than their own children.
That’s how sick they are.
Villago Delenda Est
@rb:
The god they worship is Moloch, or Mammon.
That Jesus fellow, they ignore the shit he’s supposed to have said.
Junior
Many years ago, in the 1970s I think, a friend took me by his friend’s house one evening to visit. I didn’t know these ‘friends” yet, and don’t know how my friend Carl knew them.
We were sitting in the living room chatting, it was a nice two story house, clean, and well furnished. After a while Carl’s friend pulled a new shotgun from under the living room couch to show us.
We all took turns pointing the gun, usually up as at a bird which is what shotguns are used for mostly. I wasn’t (and am not) a big hunter, I was probably about 20 at the time.
When they passed me the new gun, first thing I did was crack open the chamber to be sure it wasn’t loaded, even though 3 other older adults didn’t bother. It was a loaded semi-automatic 12-guage we were playing with!!!
They were all shocked and embarrased about their unsafe conduct. There were little children upstairs asleep, where they were pointing the gun. Presumably that gun had been lying uhder the couch where little kids could have pulled the trigger without even picking it up, perhaps for days or weeks, tho I doubt it had been very long, the way they enjoyed the newness of it.
I’ve never handled a gun ever since as if it were empty, even after I look into the chamber to see that it’s empty.
Glocksman
@Chyron HR:
I love you too.
@Another Holocene Human:
The main reason I know that many oppose it is that the presence of ‘taggants’ as they’re called changes the burning rates of the powder, thus making unusable with reloading data for ‘pre-taggant’ powder.
Of course the obvious fix is to generate new loading data and clearly label tagged powders as being unusable with pre taggant data.
Then again, the same fools who leave loaded guns unsecured when they have children in the house will somehow manage to ignore the warnings and have their new reloaded ammo blow up in their faces.
Somehow I can’t get too worked up over that.
@Anne Laurie:
Indeed.
There are already means that are easily available for people with children to secure a self defense gun from children and yet still have quick access when needed. For example, ‘fast access’ gun safes for pistols are about $150 or so and could easily prevent a tragedy from occurring.
If you can afford a $400+ pistol and have a child in the home, an extra $150 shouldn’t be a problem.
@patrick II:
IMHO, anyone who claim’s ‘god’s will’ as an excuse is merely trying to absolve themselves from blame.
Would your friend’s brother have claimed ‘god’s will’ if his kid had been run over by a drag racing teenager or a drunk driver?
@badjim:
Unless you’ve let that box of shells get wet, I’ll bet they’re still as good as the day they were made 30 years ago.
Before I sold off all of my guns, I had a Czech surplus CZ 52 pistol and shot box after box of Polish mid 1950’s manufacture surplus ammo through it without a single misfire.
Aimai
@leeleeFL: i agree wirh the MADD suggestion and its one i make frequently. But imagine if the drunks rather than being ashamed of the harm they are wreaking acted as if their right to drink and drive was a constitutional principle and every time you protested they vowed to drink a d drive more, through crowds, auming their cars at children, and daring the police to do something and suing the police every time the police pushed back?
Cassidy
@Glocksman: $400? Where the hell are you shopping?
They complain about the safe. Supposedly it takes them too long. The problem is they don’t train, which is my overall problem with people who carry in public anyways.
jefft452
“The tree of Liberty is watered with the blood of Toddlers” – T Jefferson
aimai
@Ruckus: The Gun/Car analogy fails on tons of levels. We do regulate Car ownership, you can’t get a lisence without passing stringent tests, the tests can be repeated periodically and you can fail them, if yo uare caught using the car without the lisence you can go to jail, if you allow other people to use your car who aren’t lisenced you are liable, you have to carry insurance, the car itself is inspected and registered to you, the car can lose its inspection sticker and then can’t be used, improper storage (attractive nuisance, on the front lawn) is also illegal.
Finally: the car can be used safely and every car is used multiple times a day so even though there are crashes those incients have to be weighed against the number of times each car is used every day–we hae a lot of crashes but we don’t have a crash 1/4 of the times the car is usued, or 1/8th or anything like that. The guns responsible for the suicides and deaths of children through negligence have an incrdibly high use to disaster ratio. How often was the gun that two year old was shot with actually used “Defensively” or otherwise? (I had a big argument with a gun troll online and he assumed the existence of a defensive necessity driving the family to have the gun). But there’s no evidence that the guns that cause these accidents were ever actually, real world, necessary or used at all.
This is totally not true of cars.
zoot
the paradox of gun ownership is that to want one is to prove yourself psychologically unsuited to own one.
Morbo
“You can’t blame the guns for bad gun safety.”
-Response to every accidental gun death ever
Pogonip
@Kay: Remember the hot-car death where the woman had a history of leaving the baby in the hot car, and, when the inevitable finally happened…she walked. Clean. She was a school principal. I’m sure the prosecutor would have been just as understanding with Brandy from the trailer park or LaQuatria from the hood.
flukebucket
I have a three year old grandson and stories like this make me sick. His Dad is a strong advocate for gun ownership but to his credit he does keep all of his guns locked in a safe and he never gets them out just to fondle them. If there are responsible gun owners he is definitely one of them.
Since I live in the south I just have to come to terms with the fact that almost every person my grandson will come into contact with will have a gun and the overwhelming majority of them will have many more than one.
I don’t like it. My wife hates it worse than I do. But there is really nothing that can be done about it.
Another Holocene Human
@Ruckus: A kid can die in an old refrigerator in the back yard, so what’s your frigging point?
I’m talking about people being killed with guns on purpose, like cars on the road, not these “tragic” “accidents” that always occurs mysteriously to gun owning families.
You know who I feel bad for? Kids allowed to play with other kids whose families keep unsecured guns around.
Gun control isn’t going to stop this kind of stuff. That would require a cultural change.
schrodinger's cat
@scav: I am for gun control, and my comments were in reference to the artwork, which I found profoundly unsettling, not the subject matter.
BobS
@Cain: In the comment section of the link to the North Carolina tv station, the gun is said to have belonged to a 19 year ex-felon. The same comment said he’s been charged with involuntary manslaughter and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
maya
@schrodinger’s cat: You would be horrified to know then that since the beginning of photography here in America (and I’m pretty sure, Europe as well) photographing the dead at their wakes/funerals, both children and adults, was common-place. There are hundreds, if not thousands of these old photos in family albums and photography collections. American Heritage Magazine had an interesting article about this practice (with samples) years ago. Often, the coffin would be photographed upright and open with the dead family member exposed amid family and friends all around him/her making the deceased an intricate part of the ceremony. A treasured memento, perhaps promoted by the burgeoning photography industry itself which actually caught on. Now we would find such a practice ghoulish but there was a time when it was perfectly ordinary.
Mnemosyne
@maya:
I read an interesting ghost story once about a family that decided to have a funeral picture taken of their matriarch because she had always refused to have one taken when she was alive, but she managed to thwart them anyway.
Because photography was so expensive, a funeral picture would often be the only picture people would have of a family member, especially a baby or child who died young. The people I feel the most sorry for when I see those pictures are the ones who had to pose with the corpse of their deceased sibling as though they were a happy family group. Those are the ones I find a little … weird.
Ruckus
@aimai:
We are in agreement about cars. I was just pointing that out without fleshing out the argument, which you have done in fine fashion. And which you have done here many times. Which was one reason I felt I could get away without making the entire coherent argument. The car gun analogy fails on many levels, as does the medicine bottle one. A gun is meant for killing, it has no other purpose.
I think one thing we have a problem with in this country is the idea that killing/death/overwhelming power solves everything. It’s in the movies, TV, popular books, conservative foreign policy all the time, liberal foreign policy occasionally, conservative rhetoric, conservative national/state policies.
Ruckus
@Another Holocene Human:
A kid can die in an old refrigerator in the back yard, so what’s your frigging point?
It’s my fucking point, I don’t know what frigging is.
Guns are made for killing. Having them everywhere leads to more gun deaths. Your answer is to change our culture. And I think you are right. Now, how are you going to do that? How many people have to die before that happens? Gun control doesn’t work? Ask Australia if it doesn’t work. It isn’t the only step but gun control is one of them. And it is one way to help change the culture rather than doing nothing at all.
opiejeanne
@maya: My grandfather was a professional photographer and when his first child was born in 1916 after quite a few years of trying, he photographed the baby asleep in his bassinette, printed the photo as a postcard and Grandma sent them out as birth announcements.
Friends and relatives sent back condolence notes, thinking it was a dead child because he was asleep. Grandma was tickled, but also annoyed, so when my dad was born two years later, the photo was taken while he was awake.
opiejeanne
@maya: I’ve only seen a few like that. Most of the memorial photos I’ve seen had what’s called a mask, sometimes a border that looks like the upper and lower edges are curled, sometimes it’s just flowers. I have one where the child looks like he/she is inside an elaborate dollhouse, looking through a window.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/snowwhite/274058555/in/set-72157594173614972
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://img1.etsystatic.com/000/0/6775609/il_570xN.343089679.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.etsy.com/listing/101491684/victorian-memorial-cabinet-photo-1800s&h=804&w=570&sz=72&tbnid=HyDkTE5N3l5qfM:&tbnh=126&tbnw=89&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dvictorian%2Bmemorial%2Bphotos%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=victorian+memorial+photos&usg=__xxWjLf8j9ilNciRA2_Pn69Xqup8=&docid=1NT2_xRA_7HI2M&sa=X&ei=ZnBlUuiIGaKEygHo4IGwCw&ved=0CEEQ9QEwCQ
CONGRATULATIONS!
Really. I’ve never met a single one. Every anti-choicer I’ve ever met is invariably in favor of more guns and more executions. No exceptions.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@rb: I have always been on the fence about the existence of a god, but am very convinced at this point in my life that if there is a god, then said god (or gods) delights in murder, blood, death, vengeance and horror. That poor Jesus fellow, while full of some of the best sentiments mankind has ever offered, was simply deluded to the point of pathology.
cminus
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I’ve actually met a few, all ultra-observant elderly Catholic women. Many are actual nuns.
You’re right that they’re exception to the rule, though.
maya
@opiejeanne: Those photo links might be memorial photos but they sure look like the subject was alive when they were taken. Similar to what we have today in newspaper obits. Probably more affluent families who had prior photos used this method of a memorial.
But your grandfather’s experience does indicate that a photo of a sleeping child did imply her death to some recipients of the post cards because that was a standard practice they, at least, had some familiarity with, even if your grandparents didn’t realize that. All photos I have seen in this genre are clearly of dead people – eyes closed, in a coffin. And, the surrounding group(s) did not look ill at ease being photographed with the dead family member but perfectly natural with it. That was what I found striking about those old photos – not the dead, but the living, loving family around it. Maybe the thought was; gee, I hope people are around me like this when my time comes.
My brother died 22 years ago and his middle child did take photos of him in his coffin at the funeral parlor. Nobody thought that that was weird at all.
jon
Heard and read some things about Adrian Peterson regarding his son’s death. But didn’t hear a single person demanding to know why a family decision to have life-support be turned off was allowed. Remember Terri Schiavo? Remember all the politicians demanding that she be allowed to, if not forced to, continue living because of the preciousness of life and the demands of Catholics and Christians to respect life?
I’d sure hate to think it’s because it was a black baby. That would really make me think bad things about those people who spend their time proclaiming the sacredness of innocent life and the need to value life at all costs. But if it wasn’t because it was a black baby, maybe there’s some other explanation.
Pro-Life is such a crock of shit.