And you thought the iPod had a kid-friendly user interface:
A 3-year-old boy found a handgun in his mother’s purse and fired just one shot that wounded both his parents at an Albuquerque motel on Saturday, police said.
According to investigators, the toddler apparently reached for an iPod but found the loaded weapon. Police believe the shooting to be accidental.
It’s never an accident when a toddler gets ahold of a loaded gun: It is criminal negligence. And we will never persuade some people to responsibly secure their guns until we start routinely prosecuting and jailing people who don’t.
True, but freedom and stuff…
Poor kid! That shooting leaves plenty of profits for future therapists….
Don’t know about jailing the parents, thus depriving the child of his parents for the duration of their jail terms, either. Seems like an appropriate penalty would be forbidding possession or storage of firearms in their house. Mom, at least, has certainly demonstrated ineligibility for a concealed carry permit!
I’m all for toddlers shooting their parents. That will teach them to be irresponsible! It’s when toddlers shoot each other or themselves that it becomes a tragedy.
The toddler was only standing his ground.
your words make no sense. an accident is usually negligent in the sense of not intentional assault. sometimes it’s an accident but it’s not even negligent. to say the situation is never an accident is wrong. people have accidents with guns, cars, knives, everything. sometimes you can accidently hit someone, if you’re stumbling on ice skates the hand flies out and strikes your buddy.
what you mean is that lots of accidents are predictable in a society with few or little regulations and controls on guns, and massive amounts of guns all over, including within reach of kids.
you may want to know that for an accident to be negligent, the court has to find a duty of care, which means, that basically a victim is foreseeable. so if you don’t secure your gun and your kid uses it to shoot someone, you could be negligent as this is foreseeable enough that you should take care that it does not happen. so in fact the predictability or foreseeability of the victim is part of what makes this accident negligence. i’ts like if you build the brooklyn bridge knowing statistically 5 workers will die, it’s an accident — you did not intend to kill them in one sense, you knew it was likely or possible so you intended activity creating a risk of harm…..if you do it without reasonable care, you are culpable of negligence for the deaths. if there’s no industrial insurance in place blocking their family’s lawsuit for negligent death aka wrongful death.
criminal laws often don’t work so well; witness gone, prosecutor declines for no reason as in kirkland recently, etc. high burden.
better is societal regulations.
mandatory gun insurance with limits of one million dollars.
mandatory use of gun safe with low enough fine that prosecutors will impose it; if you impose a prison term for someone whose kid killed the other parent, um, prosecutor ain’t gonna prosecute.
make it a infraction and civil penalty suit for inviting kids over with guns loose in the house.
I think deeper than all this is just having the argument 400 million times and winning it: guns make us less safe, the 2d does not let you have any gun you want, we can ban some kinds of weapons, or allow only 3% of population to have guns, if the gun is at the ready to defend the home it’s not secured, you’re the danger, the good guys with guns are ones who get rid of them, you’re a bad guy with a gun if you’re carrying it about or leaving it in the purse or nightstand. you don’t need these guns and they endanger us all. there are hordes of folks like my pal who has ten guns. he safely showed us how to use them, he was former army, and while handling them a bullet got stuck in the chamber and i didn’t notice. it was bizare to me to go to a range and shoot, totally boring and unfun. we need to make owning guns weird, perverse shamreful and out of bounds. like smoking.
@5 Is a point somewhere in there?
@6 Well done.
The incident happened in a motel room. No mention what hotel so it could have been the Hilton or out along the interstate. Most hotel rooms don’t come with a spot to store your weapons, and depending they may be someplace you might want to be able to get to your weapon which would be inconvenient if you have stored it in the hotels safe. If you wouldn’t store $500 in cash in the safe you probably won’t store your gun there.
So we have a tragic accident. Maybe mom and dad here really don’t need that gun for protection, still it’s an accident, and not negligence. Some three year olds are capable of opening a gun safe and pulling a gun out and even loading a gun. They aren’t particularly good with the whole consequences thing.
Personally it’s far more criminally negligent that parents haven’t vaccinated their children for measles, yet not one parent will go to jail over the current outbreak. And yep we got measles right here in wonderful Washington. Gun in a hotel room with a three year old. Happens probably pretty often not a good mix. Unvaccinated kids around kids with measles that is very bad and negligent.
Is @8 a lame attempt to make excuses for a mother who kept a loaded gun where her 3-year-old could reach it? There’s NO plausible excuse for that. If she can’t do better than that, she shouldn’t have a gun in the first place.
@8 “Some three year olds are capable of opening a gun safe …” The CIA needs to recruit those kids!
I feel the same way about Anti-Vaxxer parents and look forward to them being jailed for negligence when these outbreaks tarnish Disney World.
@7, yes the point is obvious, it’s nonsensical to say it’s never an accident, it’s negligence, as laboriously explained. negligence is always what we call an accident; that the negligence is likely at a societal level is akin to the legal issue of duty and the range of the duty of reasonable care (if baby gets gun due to parental negligence, drops it, the bullet goes through twenty pages of a book then hits a monkey that jumps splattering paint on my suit, no I can’t sue the parents for negligence) so it’s doubly ironic that goldy doesn’t know the meaning of the word accident or negligence and uses the foreseeability of the event as a way to say “it’s no accident this happened” when in every single freaking negligence case in the law books there is a concession or ruling that the thing was foreseeable enough to create the duty in the first place. thought you was a rabbitylawyer, too.
Guns are the best. We should build basement shooting ranges in schools so kids of all ages can be familiar and safe with them.