On Sunday evening, a two-year-old girl from Chicago was transported to the hospital after shooting herself in the hand with a gun she found.
According to FOX 32, the incident happened on West Jonquil Terrace in the Rogers Park neighborhood at 6:15 p.m. It isn’t known if a parent or guardian was in the house during the shooting. So far, no one has been taken into custody.
Law enforcement officers have emphasized the importance of appropriately storing firearms in the home, as child-involved shootings have lead to both injury and death. In March, a three-year-old girl in Houston fatally shot her four-year-old sister while alone in a bedroom, reported Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez. At the time, five adults were in the apartment and they secured the weapon and called the authorities once they heard the shot.
Similarly, a three-year-old boy in DeLand, Florida was shot and killed in February while his parents were grocery shopping. Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood revealed that the boy had wandered into his parent’s bedroom and found a loaded gun in a nightstand, shooting himself in the face with it. He was taken to a hospital, but pronounced dead. The boy’s sixteen-year-old sister was watching him, and his eight-year-old brother was also in the home.
Noting that the family’s gun safe wasn’t locking properly, Sheriff Chitwood stated that he wanted other families with a broken gun safe to “hear the sixteen-year-old say ‘My brother shot himself and he’s not breathing.’” He added that he hoped this would lead them to “run out right now and buy a gun safe.” He also noted the intense emotional effects of the incident on the family, as well as his deputies, who were assigned mandatory counseling. He concluded saying, “This should not have happened, and my deputies and dispatchers should not be going through what they’re going through.”