Jasiyah Vasquez, 12, fatally shot by brother, 13, Collegeville, Montgomery County, 19 Mar 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/03/29/children-under-fire-excerpt/

This is a sobering long-format essay about the risks to children associated with having unsecured guns in the home, which is NOT a point I am trying to discuss on this thread (or anywhere on WS due to TOS), but I am sharing this article here because of a relevant passage about efforts to make parents liable for their children’s misuse of firearms:

“A Washington Post review of 145 school shootings committed by children in the two decades after the Columbine High massacre in 1999 found that the weapon’s source had been publicly identified in 105 cases. In total, the guns those children used were taken from their own homes or those of relatives or friends 80 percent of the time, but in just four instances did the adult owners of the weapons face any criminal punishment for not having locked them up — and none of those prosecutions stemmed from negligent-storage laws.
“We’re looking at a class of crimes where deterrence might actually work,” said Russ Hauge, a former Washington state prosecutor and Second Amendment supporter who tried, in vain, to imprison a gun owner after a third-grader found the man’s .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun and took it to school, where it went off, leaving a bullet lodged near the spine of an 8-year-old girl. “If there was a clear law that says felony punishment will ensue if you don’t handle your weapons safely, I think we could get some people’s attention.”

It will be interesting to see if this particular case in PA is used as a sort of test to see if courts are comfortable holding parents legally responsible for their children’s actions with their (the parents’) firearms.

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