When a three-year-old toddler shoots his mother in the head as she changes the diaper of her other one-year-old child, that is not a "horrible, horrible accident" as the police described. It was an easily preventable incident.
I was reading David Waldman's Gun Fail Diary and wondered how many of these incidents I could find here in Canada. So I did a Google news search and found this story about a mother getting shot in the head by her own child. It just happened to be reported on a Canadian site. (In case you're wondering, I found two Canadian gun fails going back to July, but I didn't look very hard).
What I don't understand is why no one in any of the reports I read questions why a loaded semi-automatic hand gun was under a couch cushion in a house with two small children. This isn't an accident, it's a preventable incident. An accident implies that the act was beyond anyone's control. I feel for the husband, the grandmother, and the two kids, but can they at least give some lip service to the fact that there was a loaded gun underneath a COUCH CUSHION!
Ok, I get it, a trigger lock just isn't practical when you need to kill the bad guy entering your house. And a gun safe? Please! When an intruder breaks into your house you might as well be one of those poor unarmed schmucks who doesn't have to worry about their kids accidentally shooting their mother.
It wasn't an accident. It was an act of stupidity that resulted in that woman's death.