Child gun deaths shake Louisiana communities

[Robb]

In December, a 13-year-old Ascension Parish boy was shot in the head, and his 14-year-old friend was arrested for killing him inadvertently when playing with a stolen .38 after smoking marijuana.

Within the month, three other similar shootings shook Baton Rouge — an alarming enough trend to prompt the district attorney and coroner there to issue a public health alert.

In New Orleans last Sunday, 5-year-old Brandajah Smith’s mother locked her alone in the house. Police say the kindergartner found a .38-caliber revolver stashed under a pillow, put it to her forehead and pulled the trigger.

The grim stories are not anomalies. The rate at which children are inadvertently shot to death in Louisiana is three times the American average. Between 2007 and 2011, at least 89 kids in Louisiana were killed in what is classified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the accidental discharge of weapons.

(snip)

But addressing the matter of such shootings is both politically and judicially a more confounding scenario than murder. Louisiana, with perhaps the most liberal gun laws in the nation, has killed legislative efforts to legally mandate that its citizens keep guns away from kids. During the past Legislative session, a bill requiring guns to be stored in a safe or equipped with trigger locks died without fanfare in a House committee.

Read More: http://theadvocate.com/home/6380283-125/child-gun-deaths-shake-area

[onehandle]

1. Collateral Damage that Preserves Freedom.

Louisiana is just too touchy. And Liberal.

[JustAnotherGen]

2. Aren't all of the parents

In Louisiana being charged with murder? I thought B. Smith's mom was arrested and charged with murder last week?

[enough]

4. Apparently not all of the parents. There seems to be a discrepancy.

snip from the article>

Brandajah’s mother, a 28-year-old convicted thief and prostitute named Laderika Smith, was booked with second-degree murder. Police and prosecutors believe that she was so grossly negligent in leaving her child alone with a loaded gun that she should face a charge punishable by an automatic life sentence. Others believe that’s a stretch, motivated by a knee-jerk desire to find someone to blame.

The accidental shootings of children is not a tragedy reserved for the untrained or the irresponsible; more than once in recent years, the child of a law enforcement officer has died the same way.

“I still blame myself for it every day,” said Ronnie Newman, a St. Charles Parish sheriff’s deputy whose 3-year-old son, Christian, found his loaded gun under the bed in 2006, and shot himself in the forehead. “I still second-guess what I could have done differently that day — what if I’d placed it here, or put it there instead.”

He’d put the boy in bed and left the room to give his 5-year-old brother a bath. He heard a gunshot from the bedroom. No criminal charges were ever filed. Investigators determined that the child crawled underneath the bed, found the loaded gun and somehow pulled the trigger. It was simply an accident, an unspeakable horror.

snip>

[sinkingfeeling]

3. Guns seem more important than children.

[marions ghost]

5. The parents do jail time for negligent homicide

= the only way to stop this.

[Robb]

6. From time to time, they do. Yet the killing continues.

[marions ghost]

7. Most of the time they get off

--more serious charges of homicide would make this specific type of gun death go way down. Because people don't follow instructions--they mainly respond to punishment.