JACKSON, Tenn.—Police say a 3-year-old boy found a gun at his home in Tennessee and fatally shot himself in the face as his mother was doing drugs.
The Jackson Sun reports 25-year-old Linda Arrington and her boyfriend, 43-year-old Antonio Dancer, were being held in the Madison County Jail on charges including negligent homicide.
A Jackson police statement says responding officers found Chrisaiah Arrington suffering from a single gunshot wound on Saturday. He was hospitalized and later died.
Police say investigators determined that Arrington and her boyfriend were under the influence of drugs when the unsupervised Chrisaiah found the unsecured weapon. And court records say Arrington told them this wasn’t the first time her son had found a gun in the home.
Another Two 4-Year-Olds Have Died By Guns In Separate States In The Past Three Days
There have been 211 children killed or injured by a gun in 2019, according to the data of Gun Violence Archive, which compiles shooting incident data.
On Monday and last Sunday, two 4-year-old boys, one in Illinois and another in Ohio, were killed by gunfire.
4-Year-Old Killed in an Illinois Shooting
The Peoria Police Department responded Monday to a call of 22 rounds of shots fired. When they arrived, the officers found two shooting victims in the parking lot of an apartment complex—one of whom was the 4-year-old, the department said.
The young boy was transferred to a hospital where he was pronounced dead less than an hour later.
How many times the toddler was shot is yet to be determined, the Peoria County Coroner’s Office said.
Police said they are investigating the incident and there is no suspect information at the time.
4-Year-Old Toddler Shoots Himself With Unsecured Gun
On Sunday, the 4-year-old son of an Ohio State Trooper died after shooting himself in the face with an unsecured weapon he found, authorities said Monday.
The gun was the “back-up” weapon of the child’s father, the Lucas County Coroner’s Office said in a press release. The death was ruled an accident.
The state police will conduct an internal investigation because a division-issued weapon was used in the incident, Ohio State Police spokeswoman Sergeant Tiffiany Meeks said in a statement.
“The Patrol family is deeply saddened by the devastating loss of (the trooper’s) child,” patrol superintendent Richard S. Fambro said in a statement. “There are no words to describe such a loss. Our thoughts and prayers have been, and will continue to be, with (the trooper), his family, friends and co-workers.”
Study: Gun Deaths of Minors Could Be Reduced By 1/3
Thirteen million homes in the U.S. have both children and guns, and a majority of those guns aren’t safely stored—locked up and unloaded. And new research suggests that if adults simply locked up their guns—the number of children and teens who are killed by firearms each year could drop by up to a third!
That’s according to a study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. It analyzed home gun ownership data from 2015.
That year, guns injured nearly 14,000 minors, and were involved in the deaths of another 2,800. Shockingly, the survey found nearly 800 of those deaths happened when guns were not locked up.
So what would happen if people made just one small change, and stored their firearms properly? Well the lead author of the study says in no small way, it would result in, quote, “substantial reductions in firearm suicide and unintentional fatalities among U.S. Youth.”
Even if just 50 percent of those people locked up their guns, 251 children’s lives would have been saved.
