Double Standards
But what’s the difference in terms of criminal negligence in the case where a parent leaves their child in a hot car during the middle of summer with the windows rolled up and the child subsequently dies from heatstroke?
Let one child die in an automotive oven and people are outraged. Leave a toddler next to a swimming pool while the mother is inside chatting on the phone? The same. Simply leave a child at home while a mother runs to the store, and it’s a case for child protective services to be called.
But let one child shoot another using an easily accessible Yurifirearm, and apparently the family has suffered enough. Or in the recent example of the Kentucky 5-year-old, dismissed by a state official as “Just one of those crazy accidents.”
Firearms, it would appear, are subject to a double standard.
An accident is slipping and falling down the stairs. Leaving a loaded gun in the corner of a room in a home with unattended preschoolers is negligence. Leaving a loaded weapon unattended in a nightstand is negligence.
And when a child is murdered by that gun it becomes negligent homicide.
It’s reported in this week’s Kentucky shooting that the parents indicated that they didn’t know the weapons was loaded. And yet isn’t the number one rule of firearm safety toalways treat every weapon as if it’s loaded?
More to the point, if the gun was indeed “stored” by standing it in a corner of the room, then it was accessible not only by the 5-year-old, but by the 2-year-old as well.
And that’s negligence, pure and simple.