Tepid gun storage law leads to carnage

Demetrius Wrentz took a bullet to the head. Last weekend. He was six years old. I’d like to report that South Florida erupted in anger over the shooting death of another young innocent.

Outrage, however, has been a scarce commodity. Demetrius’ death fell into that other, less noticed category of juvenile firearm casualties: the accidental kind. The carnage caused by utterly preventable “accidents” apparently provokes less disquiet than gun massacres, drive-by shootings, gangbanger executions and other child killings that get us so riled.

But a first grader who unwittingly discharges an unsecured pistol he found in his parent’s home has suffered a no less deplorable death. Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, one of the few community leaders to express dismay over the killing of Demetrius, tweeted, “What will it take for adults to secure their guns? How much more heartache? When is it finally enough?”

A kid dies from an accidental shooting every other day in the United States, according to a collaborative investigation by The Associated Press and USA Today. Almost always, the trigger was pulled by the victim or a playmate. Almost always, the gun owner failed to secure the weapon. That described the death of Demetrius in his Miami Gardens home. Police think the first grader, who was handling the gun as if it was toy, shot himself.

Often the victims are even younger. Five weeks earlier, in a nearby neighborhood, a two-year-old survived a gunshot wound to the abdomen after he found his father’s a loaded pistol. A week later, the same scenario led to the death of a Jacksonville two-year-old.

The AP/USA Today investigation examined about 1,000 accidental shootings and found that “deaths and injuries spike for children under 5, with 3-year-olds the most common shooters and victims among young children.” Ninety kids aged three or younger were killed or injured in the shootings, usually self-inflicted. In all, 152 children under 12 were killed by self-inflicted gunshot wounds or by another child. Seven of those kids were from Florida.

An investigation by the Tampa Bay Times came up with even more gruesome numbers. After reviewing hospital and medical examiner records, the newspaper calculated that Florida children suffer a gunshot wound every 17 hours.

Last month, McClatchy newspapers, in partnership with The Trace, a non-profit that tracks firearm issues, counted 1,100 teen and child gun deaths nationwide in the 12 months following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting. “That’s a Parkland every five days,” the report noted. At least 154 of those fatal child shootings were classified as accidental. Twenty-one of the victims were two or younger.

It’s as if U.S. children have been consigned to a war zone. A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Medicine found that 91 percent of children under 14 who were killed by firearms lived in the United States.

No wonder. The U.S. has the most permissive gun ownership laws in the industrialized world. And so many privately-owned weapons (perhaps 350 million) that tragic accidents become a statistical inevitability.

Most advanced nations, in addition to stringent background checks for gun purchasers, have strict laws governing storage. Israel, Germany, Britain, Austria, Japan, Australia, India, China, South Africa, for example, require storage lockers that can pass police inspections, according to the New York Times. Not the U.S.

State laws regarding storage vary, but only Massachusetts requires guns to be safely locked away when not in use. A study published in the Journal of Urban Health estimated that 4.6 million children live in homes with unsecured guns, which may explain why the U.S. suffers twice as many accidental child firearm deaths a year than the total firearm deaths England reports in any age category.

Florida, at least, has a tepid statute that requires gun owners to store their weapons in locked containers or apply trigger locks if the owner “reasonably” concludes that a minor might be in the vicinity

The sad irony is that the owners purchased the firearms that killed 154 children accidentally and provided the means for a thousand kids’ suicides to protect their families. Except a study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that for gunshot fired in self-defense, there were four accidental shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides and 11 attempted or completed suicides.

That’s the bloody reality. That and the death of Demetrius Wrentz.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.