VENICE, Fla. (AP) – Sarasota County Sheriff’s deputies say a 3-year-old boy shot his 1-year-old sister in the face as the two were in a car in the parking lot of a daycare.
A news release said the incident happened at 4:30 Friday afternoon in Venice, a small city south of Sarasota on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The girl was flown to All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg with non-life threatening injuries and is expected to recover.
Officials say the children were left alone in a car while their mother was talking to people in the parking lot. A report said the boy picked up a handgun in the car and fired it, striking his sister. Only one shot was fired.
Deputies said that no criminal charges were expected Friday.
No doubt the mother feels awful about what happened, but we’re never going to curb reckless gun ownership until we start prosecuting it, just like we do with drunk driving. Were her daughter injured in accident during a DUI, the mother would have been prosecuted. She should be prosecuted for this too.
They should do more than prosecute her. They should take her kids away. Anyone who leaves a loaded gun in a car with 1 and 3 year old kids is an unfit parent and isn’t fit to have custody of their children.
@1,
Yeah, and we should also aggressively punish those who cause accidents while texting and/or talking on their cell phones.
@2 – you are correct, sir.
@2 and 3. I believe we already do. I think many people are in jail, if they aren’t dead themselves too because of the wreck, because of texting.
Same thing with drinking and driving. Gun owner shouldn’t be different.
I’m surprised you guys don’t just come out and say stopping marriage equality is more important, especially the lib.
@2 and @3 may have misunderstood. I thou you were disagreeing with @1
Goggle manslaughter texting and you will find many people that were sent to prison for texting
I think @2 was disagreeing, but not @3.
So, if I just left a can or roach spray in a playground, I’d be in legal trouble, right?
@6 failure to be responsible must be held accountable.
What about if someone who is HIV positive but doesn’t know because they didn’t test themselves and they infected someone else, they’d be in legal trouble, right?
@2 Yes, but guns are more dangerous, and therefore stupidity with guns should be punished more severely.
@7 The law distinguishes between accidents and deliberate acts. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, “Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.” One might argue, though, that the law isn’t as smart as the dog. As Charles Dickens, and others before him, have observed, “The law, sir, is an ass!”
You can’t cure stupidity by legislation. There is a vast difference between a mother leaving a gun in a car and drunk diving. One is at best negligence and the other an act by the mother. A more apt comparison is to have the three year old driving (drunk or sober) Not something most prosecutors are going to go after a parent for, and he same applies to a three year old shooting a one year old. Nor do we know all the facts here. It may not have been the mothers car and she didn’t know a firearm was in the car. Perhaps the three year old had to escape a car seat, remove the keys from the ignition and then unlock the glove compartment or other compartment and then remove the gun.
While the parent was negligent would justice or the well being of the three year old be justified in putting the parent in prison or jail. For how long? Putting both children in foster care? What of the other parent if there is another parent? Are they also not potentially culpable if only because the parent who had the children is flakey? There are costs here that society has to be willing to cover. Ultimately will being tough on parents in these situations really have the effect Goldy is proposing? The death penalty or even long imprisonment has not brought down the murder rate.
These tragedies should of themselves negatively impact Americans love of guns, yet they do not. What does that say about our society?
@10 Res ipsa loquitur.
@10: Your attempt to distinguish between drunk driving and gun recklessness cuts the other way. People who drive drunk often are alcoholics whose judgment is impaired by their addiction. Careless gun owners have no such excuse, they simply choose to disregard obvious danger.
Gun violence is excused when committed by “good” people not because of legal exemption but because we worship guns in America and give them special consideration.
We can’t cure stupidity by legislation but we do punish it when it results in criminal action.
Every dead kid is a reason for the NRA to up its sales pressure on the public. Every massacre is presented as a possible threat to firearms ownership. The reckless negligence on the part of a gun owner resulting in a negligent discharge that kills a family member or a neighbor kid or something always results in the NRA starting a huge multimedia campaign: “SEE? The Government is trying to take your guns away! We CANNOT allow any laws that would endanger the Right To Keep and Bear Arms or the Second Amendment!”
Over and over and over, lather, rinse and repeat. Every fucking time.
Sandy Hook and Columbine and Littleton were the best sales events the gun manufacturers could ever have had. They treated those events like all they were, were proof of the reliability and overall quality of the products they make.
Airlines are held accountable for terrorists performing a calculated and extremely well planned act. So why shouldn’t a gun owner be responsible and accountable for the accidental shooting and/or killing that occurs because some one by mistake gets a hold of THEIR gun. Where is the conservative mantra of personal responsibility?
NRA membership shrunk a bit this afternoon …
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/.....index.html
@12 We don’t know from the facts presented, Could be mom was drunk, high or busy texting while talking to neighbors. I actually disagree with the original comparison. While I may agree with the gut feeling here, I cannot agree with my gut feeling based on the US Constitution and the laws of these United States and the individual states. While there is an argument for negligence it’s the actions of a three year old who cannot be held responsible for his actions that did the act here. Prosecutors must follow the law, and are supposed to bring charges when they believe they can get a conviction. The majority of prosecutors are not going to bring charges in this case because they cannot win, at least based on the facts given.
@11 Gets more to the point. The prosecutor must decide to proceed from the facts of the case and there are 4 elements that must be shown to prove Res ipsa loquitur. You have a problem with at least 2nd element, as does any prosecutor. Nor can a three year old be considered an agent as they are a minor or under the English common law an infant.
@13 That is todays NRA they are allowed to do that. Originally the NRA was very much into gun safety, and not so much in the pocket of gun manufacturers.
@14 If an adult picks up your gun and shoots a bystander and it’s not self defense there is a fair to middling chance that you will see someone held to personal accountability. If not criminally then civilly. Airlines have accountability to the other people on their aircraft that they have kept terrorists off the aircraft or made a reasonable effort to do so.
PS I don’t like firearms or guns though I have shot expert on the range with a M-16. Still they are a tool and sometimes a necessary tool.
So you all would argue that if the three year old had hit his sister with a hammer and caused an injury or had picked up a knife in the car and stabbed his sister or maybe picked up a nail gun and shot his sister with a nail gun that the mother should be prosecuted? Why not prosecute for any of these things? Why only if the tool used is a firearm?
@18 yes, hold people accountable for being irrisponsible. What if it was you child in the car? Would you be as understanding? It appears that the dilema is that if it doesn’t affect oneself then you can let it slide. Like if a member of a family kills another person accidentally, so long as the accident didn’t occur to your child then you don’t care. Why were the families of 9/11 compensated for? Was that an accident? Or out of the hands of the airlines? Do we just hand out money out of sympathy to everyone?
How do you justify that action with respect to holding someone accountable and responsible, because the whole point of it was to protect the airlines from a mass lawsuit as to be accountable and responsible, and yet not hold a parent responsible in some way for their stupidity.
What if the child kills your child by accident but it could have been prevented if they were more responsible? How can you justify fighting for yourself in principle if it doesn’t apply to the offending party even if it is kept within their own circle of life?
How can we even be allowing some people to stand in the way of marriage equality when it is perfectly acceptable to you to have a parent be irresponsible and not accountable for any of their responsibility?
On another note – you hear story after story of a parent being arrestted or kids taken from their parents because they left young kids unattended either in the house or car, you know because they were looking for a high or needed a gambling fix at the local casino, and they didn’t have the money for a baby sitter.
But leaving a loaded gun or knife or hammer or brick or foreign object and leave them unattended to watch what they are doing, and they injure someone else in the process and the parent isn’t held accountable.
One is excusable and the other isn’t. Who’s playing god here or king?
@19 @20 It’s about the law and the facts of the case. That is what the United States systems of laws is based on. If a three year old injures their younger sibling whether it’s with a brick, gun, knife, screwdriver, ect. It’s not likely the parent or parents will be punished. On some level the parent or parents are arguable negligent, but anyone who has dealt with a three year old knows these kind of things happen. Even when the three year old is not Stewie Griffith. A three year old isn’t culpable. One may argue under the Roman rules that the father should punish the three year old up to killing the child. While that won’t fly today the legal principles and rights of parents do apply. If both children are the parent or parents child there is no one for the parent or parents to sue. If their three year old injures someone else then the parents may be sued to make those parents whole. It’s unlikely a prosecutor will hold the parents responsible for the actions of their three year old child. Now the parent hands the child a loaded gun or a knife and tells child to use it then you have a different set of legal facts that the parent is culpable.