Accidental shootings kill a US child every other day
Advocates demand stricter laws
HOUSTON: Hours earlier, he was a happy 4-year-old who loved Ironman and the Hulk and all the Avengers. Now, as Bryson Mees-Hernandez approached death in a Houston hospital room, his brain swelling through the bullet hole in his face, his mother assured the boy it was OK to die. “When you are on the other side,” his mother, Crystal Mees, recalls telling him, “you are going to see Mommy cry a lot. It’s not because she’s mad. It’s because she misses you.” And this: “It’s not your fault.” But whose fault was it? Bryson shot himself last January with a .22-caliber Derringer his grandmother kept under the bed. It was an accident, but one that could be blamed on many factors, from his grandmother’s negligence to the failure of government and industry to find ways to prevent his death and so many others. The AP and the USA TODAY Network set out to determine just how many others there have been.
The findings: During the first six months of this year, minors died from accidental shootings - at their own hands, or at the hands of other children or adults - at a pace of one every other day, far more than limited federal statistics indicate. Tragedies like the death of Bryson Mees-Hernandez play out repeatedly across the country. Curious toddlers find unsecured, loaded handguns in their homes and vehicles, and fatally shoot themselves and others. Teenagers, often showing off guns to their friends and siblings, end up shooting them instead. Using information collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonpartisan research group, news reports and public sources, the media outlets spent six months analyzing the circumstances of every death and injury from accidental shootings involving children ages 17 and younger from Jan 1, 2014, to June 30 of this year more than 1,000 incidents in all.
Among the findings:
• Deaths and injuries spike for children under 5, with 3-yearolds the most common shooters and victims among young children.
• Accidental shootings spike again for ages 15-17, when victims are most often fatally shot by other children but typically survive self-inflicted gunshots.
• States in the South are among those with the highest per capita rates of accidental shootings involving minors.
Another finding: The vast majority of shooters and victims are boys. A shooting last year in Shreveport, Louisiana, is a case in point. Cameron Price, 4, and his 6-year-old brother, Ka’Darius, were riding their bikes outside the Levingston Motel, where their family had taken a $30-a-night room. They decided to go inside, into a room where several adult acquaintances of their parents had been smoking marijuana. A gun was sitting out, and Ka’Darius thought the chrome and black .40-caliber pistol was a toy. Then a single shot rang out, and the bullet fatally struck the younger boy. Ka’Darius later told police he “pushed the bad button” and he understood his brother “had a hole in his head,” was going to the hospital and not coming home.