How did Canton Township 3-year-old get the gun?

When you're around 3 or 4, life starts to come into focus.

You start being able to remember incidents in your life.

Like shooting your mom.

On Dec. 2, a Canton Township woman escaped serious injury ― and possibly death ― after being accidentally shot by her 3 year-old son.

Now, you might think toddlers shooting people is an unusual occurence. It is not. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that toddlers were involved in shootings on a weekly basis, including self-inflicted fatalities.

The data was based on statistics compiled by Everytown Research & Policy, which reports that so far this year, 275 children have been involved in accidental shootings resulting in 125 deaths and 161 injuries.

Now, we can say there are some things that don't require repeating, like adults should always take preventative measures to keep guns out of the hands of children, but the facts don't bear that out.

There may be some who argue that we shouldn't finger-wag, that parenting is a job for which no one is ever fully prepared.

If a ninja married a safecracker, any child they produced still would not have the skill set of the average American toddler, who only requires that your attention be diverted for a nanosecond to be where they shouldn't.

But there are no do-overs for gunshot wounds. Someone has to answer for being so careless.

Our community knows all too well the tragedies which can occur when guns are within a child's reach. King Pleasant of Canton was just 6 when he died in 2020, accidentally shot by a 13-year-old neighbor with a stolen gun the boys found.

In another sign of carelessness, the theft of the gun was never reported.

More Charita Goshay:Kids with guns are a public health catastrophe

This year, teenagers with guns wreaked havoc in Stark County, committing murders, robberies and felonious assaults. In one case, two boys, just 16 and 17, shot a Canton man for scolding them, then allegedly laughed about it. They'll spend at least 18 years in prison for his murder.

It speaks to the immaturity that disqualifies a child from having easy access to a weapon.

Teenagers with guns caused untold sorrow in Uvalde, Texas, and in Buffalo, New York. Though they owned the guns legally, they clearly were unequipped emotionally to own such weapons.

Gun safety isn't a binary choice. A toddler getting hold of a gun is a preventable act. Surely we can defend and uphold our constitutional right to own guns while also ensuring that those guns remain out of a young child's reach.

But that's not what's happening. No matter how many candlelight vigils, no matter how many funerals, roadside memorials and murder trials, our culture continues to be not serious and reckless in how we handle guns.

Guns left on coffee tables and nightstands. Guns without trigger locks. Guns left unsecured in handbags, closets, and unlocked glove compartments are all an invitation to wash, rinse, repeat, so that gunshot wounds now have become the leading case of death for children, supplanting car accidents, according the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In life, there are moments of grace, and then there is sheer dumb luck.

That a little boy didn't accidentally kill himself or his mother on Dec. 2 just may be a blend of both.

Charita M. Goshay is a Canton Repository staff writer and member of the editorial board. Reach her at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Charita Goshay: Carelessness with guns putting children in harm's way