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Jun 20, 2023

Require SC parents to lock guns to prevent child tragedies

Pediatricians at MUSC have led efforts to talk to their patients' parents about gun safety. A law could boost the effectiveness of those conversations. Wade Spees/Staff News that Summerville police

Pediatricians at MUSC have led efforts to talk to their patients' parents about gun safety. A law could boost the effectiveness of those conversations. Wade Spees/Staff

News that Summerville police arrested a mother whose 3-year-old son shot himself to death and a grandmother whose 2-year-old grandson wandered off and drowned in a retention pond just a few days later served as a sobering reminder of how vital precautions and strict attention are when we care for small children.

The Post and Courier’s Ali Rockett reports that Sierra Morrison was charged with unlawful conduct toward a child after police found a 9 mm handgun next to the boy’s body and gun accessories strewn across the floor away from a nightstand's opened drawer.

The boy’s mother told police she had left the child unattended playing with a tablet computer for up to an hour while she watched a video downstairs with her other son; she said she heard a loud bang and discovered her child in a pool of blood upstairs. Police reported that although the family had a locked gun safe nearby, “an unsecured loaded firearm … was left in the top drawer of the nightstand.”

Faith Robinson also was charged with unlawful conduct toward a child after an investigation found that her grandson wandered out an unlocked screen door after she went to her car to pack up, then left the house without checking to make sure he was OK.

Unlawful conduct toward a child — defined in these cases as unlawfully placing a child at risk of harm — is a felony that carries a prison term of up to 10 years.

Although the adults in both instances no doubt will be tormented by their awful decisions for the rest of their lives, we welcome the department's willingness to charge parents and other caregivers when they don’t do enough to protect children, rather than confining their arrests to people who actively seek to harm children. Something similar, although far less serious, happened last month when Mount Pleasant police charged a man with child endangerment after he led them on a high-speed chase — apparently in hopes of avoiding a speeding ticket — with a child in the truck.

Prosecuting such cases elevates the profile of these tragedies and sends an important message to caregivers about their awesome responsibility — and about how quickly things can go wrong.

But the awful reality is that while necessary, all the criminal charges and convictions in the world won’t bring back those children. Our greater goal must be to prevent such tragedies.

We usually think about criminal laws in terms of punishing bad behavior, and that’s important. But when written well, laws can play an even more important role: They can communicate to people what society expects of them, and considers acceptable behavior. And by setting expectations, such laws can change behavior. The best criminal laws, in fact, are those we rarely have to charge anyone with violating, because their presence has deterred the bad action.

We can’t prevent all tragedies by outlawing the underlying behavior, of course: We can’t imagine all the actions that can lead to tragedy, and even if we could, it would be inappropriate to outlaw all potential dangers. Children wouldn’t die in car crashes, for instance, if we didn’t allow children in cars. Toddlers wouldn’t drown if we made it illegal to let them get within a mile of a body of water — and if we outlawed bathtubs. But those are all ridiculous ideas.

There is, however, a straightforward law we could pass to raise awareness and protect children from unintentional gunshot wounds — which are now the leading cause of child deaths in the United States, surpassing motor vehicle crashes, drowning, poisoning and all diseases: Require people who live with children to keep their guns unloaded and locked, either in a safe or with a gun lock. Bring felony charges whenever a child injures or kills himself or someone else with a gun that wasn’t stored in accordance with the law.

It would be easy to write such a law in a way that excessively restricts adults’ right to own guns — by applying it to everybody, for instance, or allowing criminal charges when no one is harmed.

But it also would be easy to write it in a way that doesn’t restrict gun owners’ rights. Don’t require people to keep their guns locked unless children have regular access to their homes, for instance. Don’t allow them to be charged if a child somehow manages to get her hands on a properly secured gun and then shoots someone.

If anything, those exceptions could strengthen the underlying point of the law: to send a clear message that those of us who care for children have a special moral and legal obligation to keep them safe from implements that kill — and in so doing to reduce the number of tragedies that occur because curious children manage to get their hands on guns and shoot themselves or others.

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