Nearly every day, a child unintentionally fires a gun and injures or kills someone, often themselves. It’s one of the most preventable forms of gun violence—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to solve. Suzy Khimm tells the story of Skye McBride, a toddler who shot herself in the head when she found a gun at her father’s home. Her father has since been charged with a crime under a Michigan law pertaining to safe gun storage:
This clearly wasn’t a drive-by shooting, police concluded. But it did fit another pattern, one that unfolds too often across America: curious young children picking up guns and unintentionally firing them, often with catastrophic consequences.
Investigators found that Tolbert had left the loaded revolver on his bed, police told her relatives the next day. While her father was in another room, they said, Skye had grabbed the revolver, held it with the barrel pointing toward her face, and pulled the trigger.
As Skye lay unconscious in a hospital bed in the days that followed—with doctors telling her family that even if she survived, she might never speak or walk again—local officials prepared to make a major announcement.
The day before Skye shot herself, Michigan’s new firearms storage law went into effect. The measure made it a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison if a gun is left unsecured and a child finds it and injures or kills someone. Skye’s father would be the first person charged under the law.
“I did not ever dream that within days of the law going into effect, we would need it,” state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said at the news conference announcing the charges, six days after the shooting. “But here we are.”
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