Two Year Old Shoots Mother in the Head

Two Year-Old Shoots Mother in the Head

One of the things that amazed me, at first about America, is the important place that gun's play in the culture. This isn't so much true in my neck of the woods, Arlington, Virginia, though you never know.  My yoga studio is a gun free zone. I have a sign on the door stating that and so far I haven't had anyone object.

At the end of 2014, right after Christmas, a mom in northern Idaho, went to a Walmart, which is a kind of hypermarkt, with her 2 year old son and some of her nieces or nephews. I suppose they were going to an after Christmas sale. The woman, who was a nuclear scientist, also had a new purse that had a special zippered pouch section for her 9 mm pistol. I suppose that northern Idaho is a particularly dangerous place. At some point, her son got into her purse, got into the special zippered gun pouch, took out the pistol and with perfect aim, shot his mom in head, killing her instantly. A day out shopping became a Christmas tragedy. 

According to this news report, Gun Expert Surprised That Toddler Was Able to Fire the Gun, typically the fingers of two-year olds are not big enough to wrap around a gun handle and their fingers are not long enough or strong enough to pull the trigger. According to the news report, most guns now don't have external safety mechanisms. They've just made pulling the trigger harder. I can see their point. A gun is inherently dangerous, why kid yourself that they aren't. It's like when people try to make desserts healthy. They're not supposed to be healthy.

While I can sympathize with the family, a couple of things are clear to me, as the mother of two boys and a girl, now gladly far past the so-called terrible-two stage. One is that the mother, if she were alive, should be proud that her son had such good aim. He really is a natural. The other is that, as happens so often in America, she lived as an American and died a very American death. There's something to be said about that. She didn't die a German death, like being killed in a massive Autobahn crash, or run over by an S-Bahn, or choking on too large a bit of sauerkraut and wurst.