This past Tuesday, a 2-year-old ended up with a gun in his hands—when it slipped out from under the front seat of a car he was riding in. He picked it up and accidentally shot his mother dead. These kinds of stories happen far too frequently. According to the Washington Post, since April 20 there have been 7 examples of toddlers (defined as children aged between 1 and 3 years of age) shooting themselves or someone else.
Last year, a Washington Post analysis found that toddlers were finding guns and shooting people at a rate of about one a week. This year, that pace has accelerated. There have been at least 23 toddler-involved shootings since Jan. 1, compared with 18 over the same period last year.
In the vast majority of cases, the children accidentally shoot themselves. That's happened 18 times this year, and in nine of those cases the children died of their wounds.
And before you get into an argument with your friend that talks about population, blah blah blah, just remind him (usually a “him”) that population density does not seem to have any bearing on this health problem.
You might think that toddler shootings are simply a function of population — the more people who live in an area, the more toddlers are likely to shoot someone. But that doesn't appear to be wholly the case. California and New York are two high-population states that have seen only three toddler shootings between them since 2015.
And Illinois, home to infamously high rates of gun violence in Chicago, has not seen a single toddler shooting since 2015.
This suggests that other factors may be at play in the states that see disproportionately high numbers of shootings by toddlers. Missouri and Georgia, for instance, have fairly lax laws regulating how guns are stored to prevent child access. On the other hand, New York has no such child access laws in place, yet only one toddler has shot someone there since 2015.
Maybe the law thing is related? Maybe not. But we need to try to figure something out because it is our job to limit the amount of tragedy we must face in this life.