Kids with guns

Virginia missed an opportunity to promote responsible gun ownership

On Tuesday, police arrested a 15-year-old student at Granby High School in Norfolk and charged him with several gun-possession crimes for having the weapon on campus.

That came two days after Norfolk police detained an 11-year-old in connection with the shooting of a 17-year-old on Sunday night.

And those incidents come only a few weeks after a 6-year-old shot his firstgrade teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News — an act of violence that shocked the community and the nation.

America is awash with guns. So plentiful are firearms, so common, that children routinely find them, play with them and use them against themselves and others. Sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose, but often resulting in tragedy.

So careless are some gun owners that in February, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration at Norfolk International Airport took the extraordinary step of reminding people not to bring guns, particularly loaded guns, through security checkpoints.

TSA found 27 guns in luggage last year, the largest total in a year, of which 24 were loaded. The agency reported 6,542 firearms seizures at 262 out of 430 airport security checkpoints nationwide last year, the vast majority of which were loaded.

So absurd is the gun culture in this country that people routinely forget they have loaded firearms and try to bring them on aircraft. And Hampton Roads is among the worst places for such irresponsibility.

“The most common excuse we hear is that someone forgot that they had their gun with them,” Robin “Chuck” Burke, TSA’s federal security director for the airport, said in a February statement. “That’s no excuse. If you own a firearm, you need to know where it is at all times. It’s part of being a responsible gun owner.”

Cue the howls of protests. Yes, yes, the vast majority of gun owners are perfect angels, keeping their weapons locked away in safes and with trigger locks, only handling their weapons with care and respect, never leaving them where children could find them and never leaving them at the bottom of a duffel bag for the TSA to find in the X-ray machine. Fair enough.

But the sheer ease by which children are able to get their hands on deadly weapons is onerous and dangerous. We are still mere weeks into 2023 and already our communities can point to several incidents of kids not only obtaining weapons, but using them against others. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list of offenses.

In 2020, the General Assembly passed a law that prohibits “recklessly” leaving a loaded, unsecured firearm “in such a manner as to endanger the life or limb of any child under the age of 14.” It is also illegal to allow a child under the age of 12 to use a firearm without adult supervision.

But Republicans in the state House defeated bills proposed in this year’s session to require that gun owners lock up their firearms in homes where minors are present, even after the shooting in Newport News. Lawmakers did approve a tax credit up to $300 for the purchase of gun storage safes or lock boxes; that bill awaits the governor’s signature.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children aged 1-19, and 4,357 children died from gunfire — in homicides, suicides or accidental shootings — in 2020. At a time when children are experiencing greater trauma and more frequent mental health crises, suicides involving firearms are rising precipitously.

It’s common sense, not an infringement on constitutional rights, to require firearm owners to keep deadly weapons away from inexperienced, immature hands and to better protect children who might be prone to self-harm. Yet, in spite of that data, and in spite of recent events, the General Assembly refused to take even modest steps to mandate greater responsibility for gun owners when minors are present.

We know what the cost of inaction will be, and it’s far too high a price for any community to pay.