At 9:40 p.m., in Evansville, Indiana on Thanksgiving, the early rush for cheaper stuff was interrupted by a gun shot. A 15-year-old boy was sitting in the car with his mother, Stacey Craven, when he found a gun under his seat and “accidentally” shot her in the back.
The not shocking part of this absolutely avoidable tragedy, no charges will be filed.
Not against the mother with the unsecured gun, and not against the teen who will now have to live with the horror of having shot his mother. Luckily she is expected to make a full recovery. It is time to stop whining that people have been “punished enough” by the tragedy that their own negligent behavior caused.
According to police the teen believed that the safety on the gun would stop it from firing when he aimed it at his mother and pulled the trigger. If you own guns it is a simply your responsibility to make sure that your guns are kept safely and your children are educated about gun safety. The first rule of gun safety is this: all guns are loaded, and all guns are on “fire,” you NEVER aim a gun at something that you don’t want dead. Period.
Yet again lives are torn apart and people are hurt by a negligent gun owner, and yet again, no one will be charged over this negligence. Yeah, getting shot by your kid sucks, but this isn’t going to stop other parents from keeping guns like this around their offspring, however, fear of losing their guns, losing their children or going to jail just might.
The Second Amendment gives you the right to own a gun, even to be armed (within the law), but it doesn’t give you the right to play Russian Roulette with a gun pointed at a family member. It also doesn’t give you carte blanche to leave a loaded gun under the seat of your car where a person that apparently hadn’t been taught NOT to aim a gun at people could get ahold of it. We NEED to start holding gun owners accountable for their actions, maybe then they would start actually doing the bare minimum for safety.
How many people have to be shot “on accident” by their own children before we do something to make it a crime to leave a gun where a child, without the proper training or ability to reason, can get ahold of it? Aren’t we ashamed of living in a country where more people are shot to death by toddlers than terrorists?
Feature image via Wikimedia Commons
