Two-year-old accidentally shoots twin with a gun they found at home
A two-year-old shot their twin sibling with a gun they managed to ‘gain possession of’.
It’s not clear how the toddler got access to the weapon while at home on Robin Hood Lane in Hampton, Georgia, around noon on Wednesday.
Their sibling – whose name and gender haven’t been made public – survived the shooting just south of state capital Atlanta.
A helicopter flew the child to hospital, where they remain in stable condition.
‘It was so scary, a terrible feeling’, neighbour Melanie Pressley, told local TV news station Fox 5. ‘We knew something terrible had happened.’
For hours, police searched inside and outside of the white bungalow, set back from the road where emergency service vehicles were parked in a row.
Toy cars and tricycles were lined up near swings in the garden where children might otherwise be playing.
It is not clear what kind of gun was used, who owned it, or how a two-year-old got their hands on it.
Police have not said whether the shooting was an accident or intentional. They have not charged any one in connection with it.
Such incidents are more common than you might think in the US, where guns are a leading cause of unintentional injury among children.
Five-year-old boy, Brooks Thomas Wilson, died after shooting himself with a gun he found while playing in his parents’ bedroom last August. A single shot struck him in the head.
His obituary said Brooks ‘lived his life to the fullest and always wore his heart on his sleeve’.
The month before, Nakyzi Odums shot himself in the chest in a Walmart parking lot, where his parents had left him in the car while they went to buy fireworks. He died three days later at hospital in Douglas, Georgia.
‘He was definitely the light and love for his parents’, his grandmother Candi Brinson said.
At least 16 people have died and 16 have been injured after being accidentally shot by children in the USA so far this year, according to data compiled by Everytown Research & Policy.
The worst year yet was 2023, when children accidentally shot someone more than 400 times.
Among those was a one-year-old shot dead by their three-year-old sibling, who had ‘got ahold of an unsecured handgun’, in Fallbrook, California, around 7.30am one Monday in July.
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