Guns and Roses

The newspapers last week brought a piece of news that I found particularly distressing. The two players in the tragedy reported were a brother-sister duo, five and two years old respectively, the same ages as my La Niña and El Niño. For some reason, that frightened me even more.


A five-year-old boy from Kentucky, USA, accidentally shot and killed his two-year-old sister, identified as Caroline Sparks, with a .22 calibre Crickett rifle that he had received as a gift on his birthday. The little girl was immediately rushed to hospital and doctors spent an anxious hour trying to revive her, but their efforts were unsuccessful. The little one was already beyond the might of modern medical science.

At the time of the tragedy, the children had been playing together in a room in which the gun, loaded with a single shell, was stowed. It was an accident waiting to happen.

The children's mother had been busy cleaning the house at that time. She had just stepped out of the house and onto the porch when she heard the gun go off. It had been no more than three minutes. The longest three minutes of her life that the unfortunate mother will very probably regret as long as she breathes.

The coroner who investigated the accident revealed that the boy was familiar with the intricacies of gun use and had often accompanied his father on shooting expeditions on their property. He added that it was a tragic situation.

This is not the first accident of its kind. Earlier, a six-year-old boy in the US died after his four-year-old playmate shot him by mistake during a playing session gone wrong. In another instance, a four-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed a 48-year-old woman.

My first thought on reading the news was about the enormity of the tragedy. No matter that only one child had died, it was still a tragedy. A travesty of innocence.

I'm not really informed about the gun control debate that is on in the US. I don't understand why guns are necessary, why not letting people pack them is a violation of their rights and why the Constitution ought to sanction something as heinous as the possession of arms. All that I understand is that, as a mother, I am deeply saddened by the senseless death of two-year-old Caroline, as also by the painful, sudden yet irrevocable manner in which her older brother's life has been, for all practical purposes, cut short, arrested mid-development, forever. I wonder how many years of guilt and therapy lie in wait for him.

There are some things that I can’t even begin to understand. Why would anyone gift a child a gun? Why would anyone think a gun is an ideal toy for a five-year-old? Why would anyone keep a loaded gun within reach of not just one but two children?

The Crickett rifle responsible for this tragedy was marketed by a Pennsylvania-based company called Keystone Sporting Arms, a company well known for selling guns specifically for children. The company’s campaign, “My first rifle,” aims to make rifles and guns seem attractive to children. The colours in which these death-machines are available, blue and green, and pink for girls, entice kids and fool grownup fools into thinking of it as a cute, little educational toy that couldn’t possibly do any real harm.

In fact, the company’s website used to reiterate that it aimed "to instill gun safety in the minds of youth shooters."

The site has been taken down since in response to the furore raised in the wake of the tragedy. However, the pictures hosted on the Kid’s Corner section of the website are available for viewing on MotherJones.

The website and the opinion of the gun lobby seem to suggest that the way to keep a young child safe is by teaching him/her to properly load and unload a gun and shoot. In my opinion, the way to keep a young child safe is by keeping the gun far away and locked so children cannot get at it.

I don't understand why there has to be a romance created around a first rifle, the way there is around a first pen, watch or car, a sort of initiation into adulthood.

David Mann, the uncle of the children, said of the tragedy, "It's something that you can't prepare for," even as the little girl’s grandmother said, “It was her time to go.” A Kentucky State Police Trooper said, "It's just one of those nightmares, a quick thing that happens when you turn your back."

Responses such as these seem to suggest that the child’s death was inevitable, when the truth is that it could so easily have been prevented just by keeping the offending weapon out of reach on that fateful day, and every day.

Who is at fault here?

The company for peddling these vicious candy-flossed death traps to children? For creating a market for guns owned by children and encouraging the belief that the possession of a gun invests the owner with bravado and machismo? For snatching innocents from their cradles and hurtling them towards their graves?

Or the parents for not keeping them unloaded and hidden, for underestimating the danger?

Or the children themselves for believing the spiel?

Children today live far more imperiled lives than we did when we were their age. That is a sad fact of our times. Shouldn’t we, as responsible parents and grownups, mitigate the danger to their lives by keeping firearms away from them?

Isn’t it ironic that the same people who go to great lengths to childproof their homes think nothing of bringing a live, loaded weapon into their children’s lives?