I have often railed about the fact that a car is recognized as a dangerous item in the hands of anyone and hence we require an age requirement, training, and certification before people are allowed to use one. And yet people in the US can just walk into some places and with little or no checks can buy a gun, which is equally if not more lethal than a car, with hardly any effort made to ensure that they are competent to use it.
That can result in tragedies like this one.
A Cheshire woman who was shot dead by her “reckless” father while visiting him in the US after a row about Donald Trump was unlawfully killed, a coroner has ruled.
Lucy Harrison, 23, who lived in Warrington and worked as a fashion buyer for Boohoo, was shot in the chest with a semi-automatic handgun by Kris Harrison while staying at his home in Prosper, Texas, on 10 January last year.
Kris Harrison, an alcoholic who had been drinking earlier in the day, pointed the gun at his daughter and pulled the trigger, senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish ruled.
He was never charged by Texas police in relation to her death, after claiming the gun went off accidentally while he “lifted it to show her”.
At the conclusion of the two-day hearing at Cheshire coroner’s court, Devonish found Harrison “knew full well he had shot his own daughter, pointing a gun at chest height and pulling the trigger”.
She ruled Lucy died due to unlawful killing on the grounds of gross negligence manslaughter.
…However, the coroner ruled that Harrison was a “secret drinker” who had, on the balance of probabilities, been teasing his daughter with the gun when he shot her dead. She said she accepted that he did not know the gun was loaded when he pointed it at her and pulled the trigger.
She added: “His actions have killed his own daughter and in the cold light of day it is hoped that he now recognises the risk he posed to her life in circumstances in which he had no experience of guns, had undertaken no training and had never fired a gun.” [My emphasis-MS]
“[H]e did not know the gun was loaded when he pointed it at her and pulled the trigger”? That statement alone shows that he is not competent to possess a gun.
I have never had the need or desire to own a gun but if I did, I would first make sure that I had some training with a professional about how it works, what safety precautions should be taken to prevent accidental discharge, and how and when it should be used.
Films and TV shows give a highly misleading impression that guns are easy to use and that can give people the impression that anyone can pick one up and use it appropriately. And yet, it never seems to strike them that this very ease of use requires that it be carefully stored away, and so we hear numerous stories of children coming across loaded guns and, imitating what they see on the screen, firing them and killing people. The statistics are shocking (as can be seen in the infographics accompanying the article).
Children often find or handle firearms in the home without their parents’ knowledge. In the United States, 2,600,000 children live in homes with unlocked firearms that are stored loaded or with ammunition. Child Access to Firearms in the US discusses the number of children who have firearms in their household, how the firearms are stored, and how often children handle firearms.
…1 in 3 homes with children* have firearms. 22 million children* live in homes with firearms(Schuster, Franke, Bastian, Sor, & Halfon, 2000)
According to Shuster (2000):
12.8 million children* (61%) live in homes with locked firearms 5.7 million children* (27%) live in homes with unlocked firearms with no ammunition 2.6 million children* (12%) live in homes with unlocked, loaded firearms or unlocked firearms stored with ammunition.
…3 in 4 children ages 5-14 knew where firearms were hidden in the home, but 39% of their parents mistakenly thought that their child did not know the location of firearms (Baxley & Miller, 2006)
1 in 3 children ages 5-14 had handled a firearm in the home, but 22% of their parents mistakenly thought that their child had never handled a firearm (Baxley & Miller, 2006)
By the age of 3, some children are strong enough to pull the trigger of a handgun (90% of 7- to 8-year-olds, 70% of 5- to 6-year-olds, 25% of 3- to 4-year-olds) (Naureckas, Galanter, Naureckas, Donovan, & Christoffel, 1995)
*Children are defined as under 18, unless otherwise specified.
I recall one occasion when our children were little and they had invited a friend over, the child’s mother first called to ask if we had a gun in the home. At that time, we were a bit naive about the dangers posed by guns and were surprised at the question but now I see that it was eminently sensible and that we too should have asked it when our children went to other people’s homes. You tend to assume that people like you are as cautious about guns but clearly that assurance is unwarranted.
Mano, you might ask your daughters if they remember exposure to guns at their friends’ houses when they were minors.
… had never fired a gun.
As a native male US southerner, I find this harder to believe than the Trinity, the Resurrection, and transubstantiation put together.
never owned a gun, know few gun owners, live in the north, and yeah, i’ve fired a gun too. people treat them a lot like fireworks. “hey i got some bullets, let’s go shoot old TVs and shit on a logging road.” stuff like that.
It’s the guns-and-children thing that I find unimaginable: people with young children usually know not to store the bleach in the cabinet under the sink, to put plastic protectors into the electric sockets, to always have an adult watch kids in the swimming pool, etc. They keep the car keys high up or away from the kids so that they can’t get them.
So, your household cleaners are locked up away from your kids, but your guns aren’t? You’ve got plastic protectors in your electric sockets, but leave your guns loaded? I cannot understand.
My poor long-suffering sister is a pediatrician (she has done long, hard service in the Great Vaccine Wars) who has trouble with guns too. Whenever a couple has a new baby, she gives them all these pamphlets on how to keep their bleach safely and how to protect the electric sockets and the swimming pool, and etc., and when she says “Are there guns in the home?” and they get all angry and shout “Why are you asking?”, she says “I’ll take that as a yes” and gives them the pamphlet on gun safety with kids. But, she can’t make them follow it, of course. They take all the other safety precautions, but not those.
As an aside: strangely, I was born in the US and have lived her all my life, but I have never so much as seen a gun. I mean, police carry them in their holsters, but I’ve never seen one drawn or a rifle or any sort of firearm. Not even in a store, or anything.
One can only hope that this state of affairs lasts: I am perfectly willing, nay, happy, to go to my grave without ever having the slightest glimpse of a firearm. I only wish that others could enjoy that privilege.
It staggers me to think a person would ever point a gun at their own child, even if confident it is empty.
One of the sad ironies in this all is that I’m old enough to remember when the now rightly dreaded NRA was the kind of outfit that would have condemned this kind of thing. When I was a young Boy Scout, we went to a camp where there was a rifle range, and one could shoot at targets (we had to buy the bullets), and shoot miniature “mo-skeet” which was done with .22 bird shot. But first we had to go through a brief NRA training course. I don’t remember all the details, but certain rules were absolutely basic. One was that you must assume all guns are always loaded. “I didn’t know it was loaded” is never acceptable, because the starting point is that all guns are always loaded. Period. The other was that you never point a gun at anybody you do not intend to intend to shoot and to kill. Again, period. Any kid who violated the basic rules would be banned without question.
That man’s defense was nonsense, of course, as others have said. But if he really was as incompetent and stupid as his defense and that of the complicit judge suggests, then along with getting away with it he should be permanently and thoroughly disarmed for life anyway.
And for the record, though it’s only a .22 target pistol which I inherited and never actually use and which I keep definitively unloaded, I have one and I do know this: a semi-automatic handgun does not load itself! If there was a bullet in the chamber, somebody loaded it and cocked it too. Either there’s another irresponsible gun user in that household or the perpetrator here is suffering from dementia, or lying in a way that any judge with two brain cells to rub together ought to recognize. This not a maybe this or maybe that. Even if you dismiss the stupidity of pointing the gun, even if you dismiss the stupidity of not knowing how to activate the safety on it, and even if you dismiss the utter irresponsibility of storing any gun in a loaded condition, it’s just flat not possible for a semi-automatic gun to fire unless somebody pulled that slide back and chambered a round.
A little note on that pistol. Back in 1946 my mom decided it would be a nice idea to have a gun, so she bought a very fine Hi-Standard .22 pistol. It was always around, never loaded but she liked occasionally to plink at targets. When I was a kid, and after we moved to the country,she occasionally did so. Her target was a magazine cover of Joe McCarthy. I still keep it around, though definitively unloaded and locked, in case I have to shoot some rabid varmint or some rogue beer can, though my eyesight has made plinking pretty plinkless at any range but point blank.
UK resident here: I very seldom see a British cop with a gun. Occasionally a taser, but even that seems to be an operational-need choice for their command.
Airports, fairly routine. Big city train stations (like London / Birmingham) sometimes. But even then the thing you notice first is seeing a cop at all.
On the last couple of x00,000 protest marches I noticed the armed cops were there, down a side-street, in a discretely marked van (presumably hogging the hot chocolate).
Clearly I’m not going to the right protest marches, but that’s how the average Brit sees guns, and is unlikely ever to see one drawn. When a Brit cop draws a gun, they have already planned how to use lethal force and is, we would like to expect, already planning how they’re going to avoid using it.
The only person I know who has a gun is a gamekeeper, and he’d be dismayed at the lack of professionalism so often described from the other side of the Atlantic.
@5, Holms, yeah, but what you don’t understand was that the daughter didn’t adore and worship Trump like her father does, which clearly in the mind of her father was a criminal offense worth of death…
When the R’s talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome, I think that better describes his cult who appear to be willing to kill to avenge his honor.
Sweden here. Our police carry guns but they are quite rarely used.
I only fired a weapon during compulsory military service back in 1982.
There are many hunters in rural areas (a necessity to keep the moose/ elk population down , as the big carnivores are almost gone) but they are not as a rule ‘ammosexuals’ like their American peers.
There are also gun clubs for target shooting, but again, this is not on a level compareable with USA.
The idea to have a firearm for home protection would be considered absurd by most people. And authorities are quite aggressive in keeping guns away from unsuitable people.
It’s contrary to the two most basic rules of gun safety. The gun is always loaded. Never point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot.
I’d been noticing for the last decade or so that every single person who gets right wing famous for using a gun is famous for openly failing to follow standard gun safety practices. When I can tell at a glance that you’re doing something wrong and the last time I touched a gun was several decades ago in grade school, you’re just not competent to have one. And yet somehow these are still the people who are praised. I’d be angry every time one of these yahoos gets good PR if I was on that side of the gun debate!
The one thing that doesn’t surprise me here is that the father pointed a gun at his daughter and shot her. Families having terminal issues is not surprising. Dealing with those issues poorly does not surprise me. Some right wing circles sure seem to struggle to find common humanity with children after they’re born, even their own. Those are the extreme weirdos over on that side of things from what I can tell, but they’re not isolated incidents either. There’s a whole little culture of treating children poorly, denying education, and basically trying to exert a disturbing level of control over who they are and how they think. No idea how common it is as those are not the kind of people I’d tend to run into or get to know well enough to discover how they treat their kids.
Yeah… my first exposure to guns was with a .177 pellet pistol out in the back woods of British Columbia, Canada. If I was in double-digit years it was only barely. And I was taught the basic rules back then by my father. I would later end up using a .22 rifle at high school under rather stricter supervision. (Yes, my high school actually had a gun range. No, that’s not normal up here, this was a boarding school that dated back to pre-WWI.) So, yes, I had the rules drilled into me really damn early.
The two closest folks to ‘gun nuts’ amongst my friends were both reservists in the Canadian Armed Forces. (One of them was actually a housemate for a while.) Both of them owned rifles, and both were quite strict about how the weapons were locked up and stored, because that’s what you do. Especially with something capable of firing NATO standard rounds.
So much of the gun problem in the U.S. is tied up in the same toxic ‘you can’t tell me what to do!’ masculinity as a lot of the other political issues in the U.S., bound up with legends of the Wild West, the assurance of ignorance, and people who have been trained since birth to live in constant anxiety and to treat every inconvenience as a personal affront.