Michael Johnson wears a firearm as he waits outside Roseburg Municipal Airport for President Barack Obama's arrival in Roseburg, Ore., on Oct. 9 after a school shooting there.Ryan Kang/The Associated Press
The tragedy of America's gun crisis, most often epitomized for the world by mass executions in schools, has now moved into a new era of absurdity – toddler shootings.
You read that correctly. Over the past two years, the incidence of children in diapers killing or injuring themselves and others with handguns has become frequent enough to merit notice.
On Wednesday, a reporter for the Washington Post who has been compiling toddler shootings found that 13 children aged between one and three have killed themselves with guns so far this year. Another 18 have injured themselves with firearms.
As well, two toddlers killed someone else with guns. One, a boy aged two, shot his father in the head. The other, aged three, shot a year-old baby in the head.
Ten toddlers have injured other people, including a three-year-old boy who wounded both of his parents with a single shot in a New Mexico motel. On Monday, a three-year-old boy in a car in South Carolina found a handgun in a back-seat pouch and accidentally shot his grandmother, who was riding in the passenger seat.
American children have long been involved with guns, only they were usually on the other side of the trigger. Between 2004 and 2014, guns killed 4,207 American children under 16 and injured another 48,379, according to U.S. government figures. That's an average of 438 children hit by a bullet every month.
So far this year in America, 566 children under 11 have been killed by guns, and another 2,059 have been injured, according to the website gunviolencearchive.org.
The same website says that, during one 72-hour period this week, there were 229 guns incidents in the U.S. that killed 65 people – almost one death per hour.
The shocking statistics help make sense of this latest twist. Given the reverence for guns in the U.S., and the fact that a weapon does not discriminate about the age of the shooter or the victim, it makes sense that the violence that defines American society would one day trickle down to children in diapers.
Gun-rights activists will no doubt argue that careless adults are to blame, not the weapons themselves. But how low have you sunk when your argument amounts to "guns don't kill babies, babies kill babies"?