When a 6-year-old allegedly shot his teacher last week in Virginia, it was shocking on two counts.
The obvious stunner was that a child that young would have a loaded firearm in his possession. It was also incomprehensible that a student that young would dislike his teacher so much that he would think it appropriate to shoot her. Children in first grade almost universally adore their teachers.
Those hard-to-imagine aspects of the shooting most likely led the schools superintendent and police chief in Newport News to incorrectly describe the incident as “unprecedented.”
Unusual, yes. Horrific, yes. Unprecedented, no.
As The Washington Post meticulously detailed in a story this week, when it comes to gun violence, there is almost nothing that can happen in this country that hasn’t happened before.
Since 1999, according to the Post, there have been at least 11 school shootings in which the person who pulled the trigger was no older than 10. In most of those instances, the shooting was accidental. Typically, the child found a gun at home, brought it to school but with no real intention of using it.
There was, however, one case that mirrored what happened last week. Twenty-three years ago at a school near Flint, Michigan, another 6-year-old boy brought a gun to school, pointed it at a female classmate and intentionally shot her in the chest, killing her.
In nearly all of these shootings by young children, the guns were obtained due to the negligence of adults, usually their parents. Typically, the firearms were left loaded and kept in places to which children had access, sometimes in plain sight.
This is not a statistical aberration either. According to the Post’s reporting, as of 2015, as many as 4.6 million children lived in homes with at least one loaded, unlocked firearm.
In about half the states in the country, that’s a violation of the law. In all the states, it’s a violation of good sense.
If you have an unlocked gun in your home, it should be unloaded and the ammunition kept separately and locked up. If it’s loaded, it needs to be secured in a place to which children have no way to gain access and fitted with a trigger lock.
Failure to take those precautions not only makes possible what happened in Virginia. It creates the more common horror in which children playing with a loaded gun within their own home accidentally shoot themselves, a sibling or a playmate.
