Parker: Safely securing guns in the home can avoid tragedy
As shootings happen, Thursday’s death on a street in the Olney section of Philadelphia will not receive national coverage.
CNN’s Mr. Everything Anderson Cooper’s not showing up for some nondescript killing, if such an event can occur.
A stunning insignificance will attach to this incident inside a house on the 200 block of West Godfrey Avenue.
The body count totaled just one, far below recent mass shootings in Sutherland Springs, TX or Las Vegas, NV.
The boy’s skin, smooth and brown, a tone and texture considered customary for bullets and violence, even as a toddler means less concern.
Plus, the shooting occurred in another urban neighborhood where violence and homicide ride shotgun with poverty.
United States media gives short shrift to individual killings although the onesies eventually deliver huge body counts in end of year computations.
This Philadelphia shooting happened about 2:15 p.m. police said as a 2-year-old boy allegedly found a loaded gun and blew his brains out.
Sounds harsh. No doubt you wanted the sell softer than summer ice cream custard, made easy to process mentally.
Police said several adults were inside the home where this boy, weeks away from Thanksgiving and Christmas- those holidays made even sweeter than pecan pie by the presence of children, found a loaded gun and killed himself.
Adults inside the home dialed 911 and phoned the boy’s father. They handed off the boy to his dad upon his arrival. He rushed the boy to Einstein Medical Center. Fifteen minutes later, hospital officials pronounced him dead.
“It appears to be at this point, a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head,” Philadelphia Police Captain Jack Ryan reported.
“Another case of an unsecured firearm in a house being found by kids and then we have tragedy.”
Capt. Ryan’s assessment described a tired theme in U.S. households as adults leave guns unsecured and children or teens kill friends, enemies or themselves.
The Associated Press and USA TODAY Network found that at least 141 deaths of minors were attributed to unintentional or accidental shootings in 2015. Unnecessary deaths continued.
•In September 2016, two-year-old Benjamin Smith went off to watch Winnie the Pooh inside a Quakertown, Pa. bedroom.
Smith found a fully loaded .45 caliber handgun his dad kept on a nightstand then accidentally shot and killed himself.
His father, Nicholas Wyllie, 26, of Quakertown, received two years prison time after he accepted a guilty plea for involuntary manslaughter, endangering the welfare of a child, and recklessly endangering another person.
•Four-year-old
Yanelly “Nelly” Zoller died Sept. 14 at the Tampa home of her grandparents, Michael and Christie Zoller.
Nelly had searched for candy inside her grandmother’s handbag. Instead, she found a gun and accidentally shot and killed herself.
•In August, a 10-year-old boy in Wisconsin accidentally shot and killed his 14-year-old brother during a game of ‘cops and robbers.’
Police said the boy pointed and fired a rifle he didn’t know had been loaded.
Internet searches detail hundreds of such incidents, perhaps not as mind boggling as mass killings but just as disappointing.
Our conversations rarely discuss safety guidelines for gun owners. Locking guns away in safe places seems like a simple solution.
Maybe if national media covered more individual gun deaths then we may witness a decline in these senseless killings.
For the record, Philadelphia police said adults remain silent about the Olney murder.
The two-year-old boy remains a victim of negligence as family members prepare for an unnecessary funeral followed by a lifetime of grief.