(Bolds mine. - SB)A 2-year-old boy in Texas was pronounced dead Wednesday after he shot himself in a home that Child Protective Services had deemed unfit for children just last year, KLTV reported.
Trenton Mathis shot himself in the face with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun Wednesday afternoon in his great-grandparents' home in Cherokee County, Texas. Police said both great-grandparents were at the home when the shooting took place.
Mathis and his three siblings were removed from their parents' home in Harris County, Texas last year by CPS due to "abuse and neglect," according to the report. Three of those children, including the now-deceased toddler, were placed in their great‑grandparents' home, despite the fact that CPS denied a home study. Such a denial signaled that CPS did not believe the home was safe for children, according to KLTV. The other child was placed in a foster home.
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In case you don't know where Cherokee County is (I had to look it up), it's about 80 miles ESE of Gun Barrel City. Seriously, no BS, that's where it is. Dallas/Ft. Worth is probably the closest major city, about 130 miles away, but Cherokee County is really out in the country.
Will someone please explain to me why two people old enough to be great‑grandparents needed to keep a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, loaded, just lying around where their 2‑year‑old great‑grandson can get to it? I know there's idiocy in the water in that part of Texas, but really...
I can't say I understand why you need to say it the way you do but, there is no reason that a 2 y/o should have access to a firearm. What this has to do with the age of the guardian, caliber of the weapon, or anything else you said. This is a parenting/guardian fail. You read the same stories about swimming pools and household cleaners.
ReplyDeleteNony, I "need to say it the way I do" because, unlike swimming pool deaths and household cleaner poisonings, firearms "accidents" are almost nonexistent in other Western industrialized nations with even minimal sanity in their regulation of firearms. Canada comes to mind. Canada has lots of hunters, and hence gun owners... but vastly fewer firearm deaths than the US. And most such deaths wouldn't have to happen here, either, if we had sane background check laws and actually enforced them, and some sort of very minimal qualification test of firearm safety knowledge. Neither requirement would in any meaningful way interfere with anyone's Second Amendment rights.
DeleteI agree this is a "parenting/guardian fail[ure]." It is also a failure of our government to assure that people who own and use dangerous objects in public are qualified to use them. We don't make the same mistake with automobiles, which we also have a right to use. A right to own and use by no means implies a right to own and use unregulated. The electorate... including, overwhelmingly, the Republican part of the electorate... agrees with me. This is not a partisan issue, nor in reality a constitutional issue. It is a public safety issue, and it was recognized as such until the past few decades when the NRA leadership lost their minds.
So far, Nony, you've commented three times on this blog. Of those three comments, three have been about firearms... not really about the constitutional issue of right-to-own-and-use, but about some imagined right to do any damned thing one pleases with a firearm. You are a one-issue commenter, and the one issue is a very narrow one. Where are your comments on the right of free speech on the internet, or the right of a woman to choose abortion? You are not all about rights; you are all about guns. Maybe people would pay more attention to you if you took those blinders off.