Kids’ accidental gun deaths undercounted

The Springfield Armory .45-caliber pistol that killed Lucas Heagren, 3, on Memorial Day last year at his Ohio home had been temporarily hidden under the couch by his father. But Lucas found it and shot himself through the right eye. “It’s bad,” his mother told the 911 dispatcher. “It’s really bad.”

A few days later in Georgia, Cassie Culpepper, 11, was riding in the back of a pickup with her 12-year-old brother and two other children. Her brother started playing with a pistol his father had lent him to scare coyotes. Believing he had removed all the bullets, he pointed the pistol at his sister and squeezed the trigger. It fired, and blood poured from Cassie’s mouth.

A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities. The killings of Lucas, and Cassie, for instance, were not recorded as accidents. Nor were more than half of the 259 accidental firearm deaths of children younger than 15 identified by The Times in eight states where records were available.

As a result, scores of accidental killings are not reflected in official statistics. The National Rifle Association cited those lower official numbers this year in a fact sheet opposing “safe storage” laws, saying children were more likely to be killed by falls, poisoning or environmental factors.

In all, fewer than 20 states have enacted laws to hold adults criminally liable if they fail to store guns safely, enabling children to access them. Legislative and other efforts to promote the development of childproof weapons using “smart gun” technology have similarly stalled. Technical issues have been an obstacle, but so have NRA arguments that the problem is relatively insignificant and the technology unneeded.

In the cases examined by The Times, in all but a handful of instances, the shooter was male. Boys also accounted for more than 80 percent of the victims.

Compiling a complete census of accidental gun deaths of children is difficult, because most states do not consider death certificate data a matter of public record. In a handful of states, however, the information is publicly available. Using these death records as a guide, along with hundreds of medical examiner and coroner reports and police investigative files, The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and younger in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas.

In all, The Times cataloged 259 gun accidents that killed children ages 14 and younger. The youngest was just 9 months old, shot in his crib.

In four of the five states - California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio - The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data. In the fifth, Minnesota, there were 50 percent more accidental gun deaths. (The Times excluded some fatal shootings, like pellet gun accidents, that are normally included in the federal statistics.)

The undercount stems from how medical examiners and coroners make their “manner of death” rulings. These pronouncements, along with other information entered on death certificates, are the basis for the nation’s mortality statistics, which are assembled by the National Center for Health Statistics,a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Choosing among five options - homicide, accidental, suicide, natural or undetermined - most medical examiners and coroners simply call any death in which one person shoots another a homicide.

“A homicide just means they died at the hands of another,” said Dr. Randy L. Hanzlick, the medical examiner for Fulton County, Ga. “It doesn’t really connote there’s an intent to kill.”

These rulings can be inconsistent.

In Bexar County, Texas, for example, the medical examiner’s office issued a finding of homicide in the death of William Reddick, a 9-monthold who was accidentally killed on May 17, 1999, when his 2-year-old brother opened a dresser drawer while in the crib with him, grabbed a pistol and pulled the trigger.

But the next year, when Kyle Bedford, 2, was killed by his 5-year-old brother, who had found a gun on a closet shelf, the same office classified the death as an accident.

A few public health researchers have noted the undercount in the past, based on their own academic studies. To get more accurate information about firearm deaths, researchers have pushed for the expansion of the National Violent Death Reporting System.

The system first started in the 1990s at the CDC but was shut down shortly afterward when Congress, at the urging of the NRA, blocked firearms-related research at the centers. The project was revived in 2002 after researchers decided to expand its scope beyond guns, but it is up and running in only 18 states. President Barack Obama has called for increased financing for the program, part of a package of gun-related proposals made after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December.

Overall, the largest number of deaths came at the upper end of the age range, with ages 13 and 14 being most common.

About a quarter of the victims shot themselves, with younger children especially susceptible. More than half of the self-inflicted shootings involved children 5 or younger; the most common age was 3.

About half of the accidents took place inside the child’s home. A third, however, occurred at the house of a friend or a relative.

Gun-rights groups have called on gun owners to safely store their firearms. The National Shooting Sports Foundation says it has distributed 36 million free firearm safety kits and that manufacturers have shipped 60 million locks with guns sold since 1998. But the groups argue that requiring gun owners to lock up their weapons could make it harder to use them for self-protection.

Gun-rights lobbyists have also helped keep firearms and ammunition beyondthe reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to regulate other products that are dangerous to children. The NRA argues that the commission would provide a back door for gun control advocates to restrict the manufacture of firearms. Proponents of regulation say guns pose too great a hazard to exclude them from scrutiny.

Information for this article was contributed by Griff Palmer of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 09/29/2013

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