You wouldn’t think it’s a story Ann Marie Crowell wants to tell frequently. Her 12-year-old son, Brian, the youngest of three, died in a gun accident four years ago this Christmas Eve.
Yet Crowell, a supermarket manager in suburban Boston, will rearrange her schedule on short notice to discuss how parents can protect children from gun violence. She is a national speaker on the topic. She thinks it is one way of keeping Brian’s memory alive.
“My daughter beeped Brian in the late afternoon to let him know it was time to come home for our traditional Christmas gathering,” Crowell recalled in a telephone interview while on vacation. “Brian went to the nearest room with a phone, his friend’s mother’s bedroom. While Brian was using the phone, his friend decided to show Brian the gun he found recently.”
The gun was loaded. Brian’s friend removed the bullets–or thought he did, taking out five and unknowingly leaving in a sixth.
The friend then starting clicking the gun. Just as Brian was hanging up the phone, a bullet ripped through his neck and down his chest.
The friend called 911. Paramedics arrived in minutes. Brian lived for three hours before dying at the hospital. The parents’ only glimpse of him was on a stretcher as he was rushed from the emergency room to an operating room.
The next day, Christmas, the Crowells received a call from Brian’s friend’s mother while the grieving parents were at a local funeral home selecting a casket.
“I called her back,” Crowell said. “She told me she was sorry. She took full responsibility. She knew her son had found the gun before that day.”
Brian’s friend found the gun while he and his mother were flipping her mattress. The single mother kept the registered gun loaded under her mattress, a habit started 10 years back during a messy divorce. Her ex-husband, then a threat, had moved to Florida.
“That’s when I became angry,” Crowell said. “The mother told her son how dangerous guns are and made him promise never to touch the gun. She said she had second thoughts about whether the boy [a 14-year-old] would keep his promise. But instead of unloading or locking the gun, she decided to just keep relocating it.”
On that Christmas Eve, Brian’s son found the gun under a pile of clothes in his mother’s bedroom.
More Top Picks Dji Vs Autel Drones
Crowell took months to heal enough to talk about Brian or begin to open hundreds of letters from strangers.
By spring, Crowell decided to call one of those strangers every night for several weeks. She started working with a local chapter of the Stop Handgun Violence organization and later joined Common Sense About Kids and Guns, another not-for-profit group.
Six months ago Crowell was contacted for speaking engagements and media appearances by Daniel Gross, co-founder of Pax, a New York-based organization devoted to “real solutions to gun violence.” (Pax means “peace” in Latin.) She was impressed by Pax’s new ASK (Asking Saves Kids) campaign. The idea is to encourage parents to ask if there is a gun in any home where their children play.
“The campaign is terrific,” Crowell said. “It doesn’t judge anyone who chooses to own a gun. It doesn’t wait for laws to get passed. It’s a way parents can do something directly to protect their kids from guns.”
Gross said several studies confirm a startling statistic: More than 40 percent of U.S. homes with children have guns. For context, that’s more than homes with dogs. Four of every 10 of those households have guns that are unlocked and/or loaded.
“This fact alone gets parents deciding to ask other parents about guns,” said Gross, a former advertising executive whose brother was severely wounded during a random shooting at the Empire State Building observation deck five years ago. “If you think the types of households your kids play in aren’t ones with guns, all we say is you could be making a costly assumption.”
“We live in a nice suburb [Saugus, Mass.] about 10 miles north of Boston,” Crowell said. “The police told us, `You wouldn’t believe how many registered guns are in this town.'”
The Pax mission is focused squarely on safety, not politics.
“We’re not trying to stigmatize gun owners,” Gross explained.
But Pax aims to make sure any hunting rifles or self-defense weapons are unloaded and locked, preferably in a gun safe, with ammunition locked separately.
“A good idea is to ask the gun question with other questions, such as whether a parent uses seat belts or if there are animals in the home,” Gross said. “Keep the confrontation and your personal views out of it.”
———-
For more information about the ASK campaign, call 212-983-8705 or check out www.AskingSavesKids.com.