A 3-year-old boy shot and killed his 1-year-old brother on Tuesday in Payson, Ariz., according to The Associated Press.
The boys and their mother were visiting a 78-year-old neighbor in their apartment complex when the shooting occurred. The two boys found a semi-automatic pistol “somewhere in the living area,” according to the AP, and then took the firearm into a bedroom. The gun went off and the younger boy was shot in the head. Payson Police Chief Don Engler told the AP that the boys’ mother was just walking into the bedroom when the shooting occurred.
Engler said his department is investigating, and will send the results of its investigation to the Gila County Attorney’s Office.
“What we’re taking a look at is the circumstances regarding the securing of the weapon” Engler told the AP. “We are continuing our investigation, and we haven’t ruled out criminal charges at this point.”
The names of the two boys, the mother, and the neighbor were not released.
What? Babies aren’t bullet proof anymore? They just don’t make them like they used to…
Criminal charges? It was an accident!
“We haven’t ruled out criminal charges?”
Oh how quaint. Yet if I leave my boys in the SUV for one minute with full visual contact while I usher my daughter into preschool, I’m a criminally negligent parent.
Fuck this shit. Here’s a proposal: If you leave a gun where a kid can get it and use it, then we get to use said gun on you.
I suppose there’s a sick fuck-the-NRA joke in here about if there had only been a good toddler with a gun to stop a bad toddler with a gun, but really, this shit is not funny at all. This family is fucked forever. The older sibling’s life is destroyed. He’ll no doubt be rendered a psychological basket case and probably a drag on society. His parents will probably get divorced and totally fall apart. None of them will survive this. They’re all doomed.
But that dead baby is a price Sam the fake plumber is willing to pay, and really, what else matters.
the days seem to alternate between mass killings and babies shooting or getting shot… i feel safer just reading these accounts of death…
I know three families who have lost a child to accidental (read: criminally negligent) gunfire.
None of them have recovered, nor will they. They all shuffle through life in a haze of despair and hopelessness. They’d probably just be better off committing suicide at this point.
This is why there are no firearms allowed in my home, and why there never will be.