As a nation we are shocked by the shooting death of a 6-year-old girl by a 6-year-old boy in a Michigan public school. We are shocked about what is unusual about this story. And if our love affair with the gun were not so passionate in this country, we also might be shocked by what is so usual about this story.
More than 6,000 students were expelled nationally in the 1996-97 school year for bringing guns to school. Considering all of the guns that are confiscated in schools each year, it is a blessing that we do not have even more shooting deaths and injuries in schools.
But as unusual as it is for children to be shot in school, it is unfortunately usual for American children–thousands of them–to be shot every year. Gunfire killed 4,223 American children under age 19 in 1997, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That’s an improvement. A year earlier the number was 5,285. Do those numbers shock us any more? If one man kills five it is a massacre. When lax gun policies kill thousands is it just a statistic?
It should not have taken the shooting death of Kayla Renee Rolland at Theo J. Buell Elementary School by a classmate who was living in an alleged crack house to get our attention. Our hearts go out to Kayla’s family. It saddens us to think of the many other children, less well-known children, who are killed by gunfire every year–and how for every child killed with a gun, according to the Justice Department, another four are wounded.
Of the above-mentioned children shot in 1997, some 107 were between 5 and 9 years old; 77 of those shootings were listed as intentional and 28 were ruled accidental. Another 75 were between 2 and 4 years old; 53 were listed as homicides. Nine of the shootings involved children who were less than 2 years old and all were listed as homicides.
A murder by a 6-year-old-boy is a wake-up call. How long, I wonder, before we hit the snooze alarm?
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“We were not looking for scapegoats in this case. We’re looking for justice for Kayla.” So said prosecutor Arthur Busch of Genesee County, Mich., as he announced charges in the killing. The boy was too young to realize the consequences of his actions, the prosecutor said, so prosecutors did the next best thing. They charged a 19-year-old man with involuntary manslaughter for allegedly leaving the stolen, .32-caliber semi-automatic gun in the house where the boy was living. That sounds just. To leave such a weapon lying around for a kid to pick up is like pulling a pin on a hand grenade.
The National Rifle Association makes a good point when it calls on lawmakers to enforce the laws on the books. But the NRA loses credibility when it opposes additional restrictions. There is no sane reason for guns to be less regulated, more accessible or less safely equipped than automobiles are required to be.
Yet the gun lobby’s influence has kept gun control a back-burner issue in the presidential campaign, while mostly Republican members of Congress have kept new regulations calling for mandatory trigger locks and other reforms bottled up on Capitol Hill.
But the death of Kayla Rolland seems to have nudged a few people. The next day, Texas Gov. George W. Bush said he would sign a law requiring trigger locks with the sale of handguns if such a bill crosses his desk if he becomes president, although he questioned how it would be enforced.
A good question. The owner of the stolen gun used to kill Kayla Rolland does not sound like the sort who obeys many rules. Still, if trigger locks would save others, the locks would be a fitting memorial to a little girl who can no longer speak for herself.
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