Playing with Guns

The Brian Lehrer Show | May 6, 2016

The entire conversation is worth listening to, but skip ahead to 21:03 to hear a caller, Tom in Tom's River, talk about how he was accidentally shot at the age of 11 years old. He's now quadriplegic, and he speaks at schools about gun safety.

Accidental shootings by curious preschoolers are happening at a rate of about 2 per week.

Jack Healy, national correspondent for the New York Times, joins us to discuss the frequent tragedies that happen when toddlers get their hands on a legally registered adult's guns, and what we can do about it. He covered a particularly tragic stretch of April where four toddlers found guns owned by their parents and fatally shot themselves. 

Healy said one of the troubling discoveries he made while covering this story was the lack of data on children who shoot family members friends, and in many cases themselves with guns owned by their parents. 

"It's tragic but the numbers are so incomplete because there are no real-time reporting requirements or data sources where you can track these things," he said. "So this group Every Town, which was the source of the numbers we used, goes by media searches and obviously some of these things fall through the cracks. Some of them may never make it into a local newspaper or hit some Google news alert. So presumably there are far more of these things out there and there also may be some of these things that never get reported to the police, if someone is thankfully not injured or hurt."

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