There is no worse agony than a parent losing a child. For the parents of a 4-year-old girl in Texas, that is their new reality. They will forever bear the burden of her pointless death. And as long as some Americans fetishize guns and ignore facts, they will not be the last parents to bury a child dead by gunshot.
The facts are sparse but brutal. On Sunday afternoon, two sisters were playing in the bedroom of a Houston apartment. Their parents and three other adults were also in the home. Each parent thought the other was watching the girls — but the kids were alone. The three-year-old found a loaded semi-automatic pistol. She shot her four-year-old sister. The victim was declared dead at the scene.
I do not know whose apartment it is or whose gun it was — although it seems likely it belonged to whoever owned the home. However, the weapon’s owner must suffer consequences — beyond the guilt they must feel — even if it is one of the parents. Because writing these gun deaths off as “it was an accident” does nothing to encourage sloppy gun owners to treat their weapons with respect. And this dismissal will continue to put kids in jeopardy.
This poor girl's death owes something to the lies the gun lobby tells. It is a fantasy that having a gun in the house makes a home safer — quite the opposite. Because the NRA and its political poodles have long blocked federal research into gun violence, there is no definitive answer on how much more likely people living in gun homes with guns will be gunshot victims. However, every study on the subject shows an elevated risk of homicide in homes with firearms.
One 12-year California survey of people living with gun owners revealed that: “Overall rates of homicide were more than twice as high among cohabitants of handgun owners than among cohabitants of nonowners.”
The survey also revealed that the prime reason given for having a gun in the home — protection — was a myth. People living in gun-free homes were no more likely to be killed by an intruder than people in gun homes.
The potential outcome for children in homes with guns is stark. Kids in homes without weapons are neither shot by the non-existent gun nor do they shoot anybody else. However, kids in homes with guns are shot— or they shoot someone — regularly. Just how often is hard to say because death certificates do not go into that level of detail.
In 2022 1,679 Americans under 18 were victims of gun homicide — 314 were 11 or younger. That fatal number is increasing — in 2019, it was 999 minors; in 2020, it was 1,390; in 2021, it was 1,573. These deaths do not occur in other developed countries — even ones with relatively high rates of gun ownership, e.g. Canada and Switzerland.
America’s gun homicide epidemic is not just due to the vast number of guns Americans own. It is also due to the Rambo mentality the gun lobby promotes — against a paranoid background of imaginary “gun-grabbing liberals”. States pass “stand your ground rules,” which make it easier to legally shoot someone and also encourage people to see guns as the first step in dispute resolution.
Bowing to and abetting the propaganda, politicians in gun states have loosened the rules for gun ownership, licensing, and training. And backed by a compliant Supreme Court, these zealots are compromising the ability of states who take gun violence seriously to enact sensible gun regulation.
The gun lobby says it is motivated by the Second Amendment. Codswallop. They love money. The NRA’s CEO makes a fortune acting as the PR department for gun manufacturers. In 2017, Wayne LaPierre received $5,110,985 in compensation from the organization — and that does not include expense reimbursement or the industry-paid junkets he enjoyed.
LaPierre’s “fuck the victim” philosophy was best shown when he declared, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” If that were the case, why does America easily have the highest gun homicide rate in the developed world? (It is 22 times that of the EU) In the US alone, the highest homicide rates are in states with the highest rates of gun ownership.
America is a country where politicians can look at the serial gun massacres of schoolchildren and declare that the real problem is that there are not enough guns. Really? How would more guns have kept a 4-year-old in Houston alive? What role would a good guy with a gun have played?
On what grounds can these people declare themselves to be “pro-life?”