But some conservative pundits have a problem with that.
Ethics Alarms covered the revolting tale of the Newport News, Virginia second-grader who shot his teacher in a January post. The position here is and has always been that when children get their hands on guns and shoot anyone, including themselves, parents who own the guns should be held strictly responsible, and should go to jail. Amusingly, some commenters here thought I was jumping to conclusions assuming that parents were at fault in the Newport News case. “What happened to waiting for facts before making a judgement?” caviled one. MIA Ethics Alarms gadfly P.M. Lawrence (where have you been, P.M.?) offered several unlikely scenarios that didn’t involve parental misconduct. I was confident that Occam’s Razor applied, and that this was res ipsa loquitor: if a second grader shoots his teacher, the parents of that second grader are almost certainly at fault.
And they were, or rather she was. The kid’s single mother, Deja Taylor, owned the gun (legally), and left it loaded and sufficiently insecure that the child could find it. Taylor was just convicted and sentenced to 21 months in prison under a federal statute that makes using illegal drugs while in possession of a firearm felony offense carrying a prison sentence of up to 10 years. Deja was in possession of and used pot. The prosecutor resorted to that law because “reckless storage of a firearm leading to child endangerment” is only a misdemeanor.
The conservative site “Not the Bee,” the non-satirical arm of the Babylon Bee, is offended by this result, seeing it as an anti-Second Amendment decision. “Taylor was just convicted and sentenced to 21 months in prison on charges related to the gun, but not because of the shooting of the teacher, mind you,” it tells us. “Mind you?” She didn’t shoot the teacher, her son did. Presumably she didn’t intend to get the teacher shot, either. Her crime involved negligent and irresponsible conduct involving her child and a deadly weapon.
NTB goes on snarkily, “You see, the charge of ‘reckless storage of a firearm leading to child endangerment’ is just a misdemeanor and didn’t make enough of a statement about the evils of gun ownership…The case had become a poster-child for gun control, so charges needed to have bigger consequences than a misdemeanor.”
No, charges needed to have “bigger consequences” because the current law covering gun-owning parents is ridiculously inadequate. The sentence sends a message, and it’s not an anti-gun message, but an “anti-incompetent parent owning a gun and not storing it responsibly causing someone to get shot” message. Good message. Good prosecuting!
Then the author of NTB’s screed (“Mister Retrops”) really goes bonkers, writing, “The sad part about the whole story is that while seeking to shield the six-year-old from the consequences of his actions, the left has taken away his only parent and almost certainly set him on a path that perpetuates criminal behavior. But, dang, they couldn’t let the mom get away with letting her kid get ahold of her gun, could they?”
No, you dolt, they couldn’t and shouldn’t. Moreover, an appeal to emotion using future projection and the tragedy of the imprisonment of an unfit mother is not persuasive. Behold the rationalizations and distortions of the biased Right! Amusingly, “Mister Retrops” emulates his progressive counterparts’ determination to jam their anti-Trump obsession into every issue, except in the Right’s case, it’s Hunter Biden. “Retrops” writes, “And seeing as how Miss Taylor is not the son of a sitting president, who happens to have been indicted for the exact same federal felony, Taylor’s trial was quick and painful without any plea deals of any sort.”
geewhatagoodanalogy…
Prosecutors have to work with the tools they are given. Locking up this mother using the felony law resulted in appropriate punishment and set an example for other negligent gun-owning parents. It might even save lives. Only moral luck saved that mother from being responsible for the teacher’s death or her son’s.
The next step is to change that misdemeanor statute into a felony law.
Ethics Alarms 
Interestingly enough; shortly after this shooting happened I was filling in at a local gun range instructing new firearm owners and there was a young mother that had just picked up her very first firearm, a pistol, and needed some instruction in the range. I took care of that instruction and as she was packing up her firearm and other gear I noticed that she didn’t have anything to lock up the firearm or the ammo so I asked her very pointedly about it and whether she had children. She acknowledged that she had a couple of children and she didn’t have anything to lock up the firearm or the ammo. I looked her straight in the eyes and told her that if she took that firearm home without anything to lock it up properly someone was likely going to end up getting shot and used this particular shooting (which was all across the news) as an example. She immediately when to the sales floor, asked for lots of recommendations and purchased the items she needed to lock things up properly. It was an added expense that she wasn’t expecting but it was a needed purchase expense that couldn’t be ignored.
Safely storing firearms and ammo are an integral part of responsible gun ownership, period!
Being ignorant or stupid is no excuse to shift away your own liability and culpability.
There are relatively inexpensive ways of reliably locking up firearms and there’s no excuse not to do it. Lock it up, the more secure the better! It’s out of the owner’s control if someone breaks secure locks and gains access to the firearm (lock up ammo separately), the liability shifts away from the owner when you lock up everything securely. But know that if your locks are a piece of shit that any grade school age child can overcome with a paperclip because your a cheapskate then you’re damned idiot, liable and maybe culpable.
Don’t be cheap, be safe!
18 U.S.C. 922(z)?
Besides that, training kids how to be safe around weapons and providing a controlled environment for them to satisfy curiosity are very important. https://www.corneredcat.com/article/kids-and-guns/safe-storage-around-children/
FYI: 18 U.S.C. 922(z) applies to the sale or transfer of a handgun by a “licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, or licensed dealer”.
This young mother didn’t pickup this handgun at this range store, she was a walk-in that had just recently picked up the handgun elsewhere. I don’t know where she got it from and it would have been a bit out of the ordinary to delve into an inquiry about such things when they were simply there for instruction, but from our conversation I’m pretty sure she got it from someone she knew. She purchased the ammo after she found out she could get instruction. In a situation like that, once the handgun passes a brief physical inspection and it’s clear that the serial number hasn’t been tampered with, they get instruction.
Yes, providing a controlled environment for children to satisfy curiosity and learn safety is very important. I did that with my children and I do that with my grand children as often as I can.
My son was regularly exposed to firearms growing up and I always talked about, and demonstrated, safety procedures when he was around. I remember when he was in first or second grade and he picked up a new Nintendo Duck Hunt pistol, the first thing he tried to do was pull back the slide to check if it was unloaded, when the slide didn’t work like he expected he put it down and pointed it in a safe direction then he turned around and looked at me. I was a proud Dad.
I have no problem with the decision but Hunter should receive the same type of sentence as should the person who pitched it into a trash bin for anyone to find. Only moral luck prevented someone from getting that weapon and using it.
Consistency in application is not whataboutism.
As I understood it, the state law violation was a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, but the federal plea satisfied the state prosecutors. So… the law and result were consistent.