The Gun Culture is Somewhat In Denial About Gun Safety.

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We had a local case of a woman getting shot by her five year old son and she was in the National Guard so you know she, at least, has access to info about guns and gun safety.

Then there's this lady in Idaho named Veronica Rutledge and here's some more about her:

http://www.khq.com/story/27730567/koote ... at-walmart

She is obviously an educated professional with a concealed weapons permit which means she had to take gun classes. These two women, above all others, should be the most educated about gun safety yet both of them managed to get shot and killed by their own young children. I am thinking the reason this is happening is a disconnect between the gun culture and gun safety. It's the only thing that explains two competent people ending up in these situations.

Both of them were women so model choice could be a factor. Is it certain women who are failing to see they need to secure their handguns?

This really saddens me. When a child loses a parent it's one of the worse traumas and to this happen because of something someone does when they are too young to even remember it. It is going to tear at his heart for the rest of his life. He will never know his Ma. It should never happen.

Also, the car culture is somewhat in denial about car safety.

True to an extent but... Tell me. How many two and five year olds do you see driving their parent's cars?

Lots.

It might happen a great once in a while but it's very rare around here and I have never heard of them killing a parent in the process.

If a parent dies in an accident because he sped down the road or a guy in the other vehicle crosses the center line, sure the kid is going to suffer the loss of a parent but at least he will know it's not because of something he did. He didn't get behind the wheel of the car and run the parent down, did he?

Who?

I disagree. When you look at how many families have firearms in the home and compare it to how many of these occurrences unfold, you find that it's actually pretty rare for children to accidentally kill/injure someone with an unsecured gun. These two events that you've shown though, are clearly incidences of the gun owners having a lapse in judgment and not being weary of their firearm placement. Unfortunately, this simple mistake led to the demise of both women.

It's wrong on so many levels. For one thing, the gun is in her handbag without some kind of safety? It could easily go off and shoot her or someone else. What kind of carelessness is this?

Yes I know there are lots of gun owners who haven't experienced this but that doesn't excuse two cases of this kind in the past six months when it as virtually unheard of before. I never heard of it happening with a child that young until the case involving the lady from the National Guard just recently now it's happening again.

Accidents happen (they're usually due to negligence)

The board outside the police office down at the 2000 people town rarely goes past "2" with how many weeks it's been since a serious car accident (it's pretty much always at "0").

Gun accidents seem worse because they are so easy to prevent.

Like, when you drive a car, you are responsible for the way you drive, there's not much you can do about everyone else but hope you don't get hit and die.

With guns, it's like, you are responsible for your gun and chances are you aren't going to encounter someone else's firearm and if you can't even manage to be responsible with your own gun, and it's so simple...should you even be allowed to have one?

Whenever I read stories like this, I think these people are simply too irresponsible to own a loaded gun. At the same time, I know there are people who own guns and never have a mishap and it doesn't matter to me if they have a gun but some of these others...I mean, you can't even have certain drugs in this country, not that I am for people taking drugs, I am just saying, why all this drug regulation and yet we let total air heads own guns in this country? It makes no sense...

Eh, stupid is stupid. People do stupid things. Sadly, you can't fix stupid. It'd probably be an interesting study to figure out the rate of fatal accidents with firearm and car owners per 100,000 or so; I'm betting it's a lot higher with the former, but I haven't looked.

Car ones are easy to prevent (I've been in two bad ones, and both were due to idiots behind the wheel in the other car), but there you go.

Of course this is terrible - as well as the tragic death, the kid will grow up knowing he killed his mother - but statistically, household guns are less deadly than household pools.

Deaths could be prevented if we restricted ownership or usage of guns and pools, but then you've got to ask whether people should ever be allowed to take risks.

That's the main thing (and whether people have the moral right to tell what others should do prior to knowing if they'll do something wrong -- especially so if it's not really a problem statistically).

You can do everything you can to prevent something bad from happening, and...something bad happens anyway. It's good to do things to mitigate the risk of certain things, of course, but there's a point where you have to accept that risks are inherent in everything and as long as it's a rare thing, then cool.

(I'm never going to jump out of a plane, but I see that it's reasonably safe for others to do it.)

Every accidental or wrongful death is terrible. But, each kind of death needs to be viewed within its own category. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, "Firearms Commerce in the United States 2011" report http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf at page 8, the estimated total number of firearms available to civilians in the United States in 2009 "had increased to approximately 310 million: 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns." And, there have been about 90 million firearm-purchase background checks performed since then.

The most recent (2011) number of all annual gun deaths in the United States was 32,163. That is about 0.0001 percent of the 310 million privately owned guns in the United States (0.00008 percent of the number including recent firearm purchases). Excluding all other firearm deaths, firearm homicides totalled 8,896 in 2012. That is about 0.00003 percent of the 310 million privately owned guns in the United States (0.00002 percent of the number including recent firearm purchases). Overall firearm violence is the lowest since 1993 http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/201 ... study-says .

As others have stated, other forms of accidental and wrongful deaths are statistically much more common. From the ubiquitous motor vehicle to swimming pools, public-school sports, stairs, bathtubs and various recreational activities, death is always around us. We do our best to minimize our exposure to risk in all categories, but there will always be a smal fraction of unintentional deaths in every human activity. No legitimate group is calling for the prohibition of motor vehicles or bath tubs which cause far more deaths.

saw someone post on facebook how you should carry your gun in a holster with no round chambered and an empty magazine on safe. saying that's what their ccw class said. o.O why carry a gun if its just as useful as a club. clubs are cheaper.

as for this sounds like the lady just picked a handgun and threw it unholsted in her purse which she allows her kids to get into(much like my sister does) difference is my sister doesn't keep weapons in her purse.

really should keep it in a holster built into purse or at least in one then throw it in. but people can and do do stupid things. the reality of freedom is that it comes with risks. to remove those risks means removing freedom.

The pistol must have had something in her bag lodged in the trigger guard to some extent, and the kid would have pulled or pushed the actual pistol to make it fire (I'm pretty sure that's how it would have happened; I haven't read the story though).

It's why you leave 'em in a holster when there's a chance of something interfering with the mechanics of the weapon (that covers the trigger guard so nothing like that can happen), even if you just throw them in some pack. Especially so with revolvers and DAO/"safe"-action pistols that don't have thumb and/or grip safeties.

Hopefully people learn from this.