[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 72 (Monday, May 9, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2646-S2648]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GUN VIOLENCE
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, during our break, last Thursday the
New York Times ran a story that was as heartrending and gut-wrenching
as I have read in a long time. The headline was: ``One Week in April,
Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves.''
I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, May 5, 2016]
One Week in April, Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves
(By Jack Healy, Julie Bosman, Alan Blinder, and Julie Turkewitz)
Kansas City, Mo.--Sha'Quille Kornegay, 2 years old, was
buried in a pink coffin, her favorite doll by her side and a
tiara strategically placed to hide the self-inflicted gunshot
wound to her forehead.
She had been napping in bed with her father, Courtenay
Block, late last month when she discovered the 9-millimeter
handgun he often kept under his pillow in his Kansas City,
Mo., home. It was equipped with a laser sight that lit up
like the red lights on her cousins' sneakers. Mr. Block told
the police he woke to see Sha'Quille by his bed, bleeding and
crying, the gun at her feet. A bullet had pierced her skull.
In a country with more than 30,000 annual gun deaths, the
smallest fingers on the trigger belong to children like
Sha'Quille.
During a single week in April, four toddlers--Holston,
Kiyan, Za'veon and Sha'Quille--shot and killed themselves,
and a mother driving through Milwaukee was killed after her
2-year-old apparently picked up a gun that had slid out from
under the driver's seat. It was a brutal stretch, even by the
standards of researchers who track these shootings.
These are shooters who need help tying their shoelaces, too
young sometimes to even say the word ``gun,'' killed by their
own curiosity.
They accidentally fire a parent's pistol while playing cops
and robbers, while riding in a shopping cart, after finding
it in the pocket of the coat their father forgot to wear to
work. The gun that killed Sha'Quille last Thursday was
pointing up, as if being inspected, when it fired.
They are the most maddening gun deaths in America. Last
year, at least 30 people were killed in accidental shootings
in which the shooter was 5 or younger, according to Everytown
For Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group that tracks
these shootings, largely through news reports.
With shootings by preschoolers happening at a pace of about
two per week, some of the victims were the youngsters'
parents or siblings, but in many cases the children ended up
taking their own lives.
``You can't call this a tragic accident,'' said Jean Peters
Baker, the prosecutor of Jackson County, Mo., who is
overseeing the criminal case in Sha'Quille's death. Her
office charged Mr. Block, 24, with second-degree murder and
child endangerment. ``These are really preventable, and we're
not willing to prevent them.''
Gun control advocates say these deaths illustrate lethal
gaps in gun safety laws. Some states require locked storage
of guns or trigger locks to be sold with handguns. Others
leave safety decisions largely to gun owners.
Twenty-seven states have laws that hold adults responsible
for letting children have unsupervised access to guns,
according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, though
experts say such measures have, at best, a small effect on
reducing gun deaths. Massachusetts is the only state that
requires gun owners to store their guns in a locked place,
though it has not stopped youngsters there from accidentally
killing themselves or other children.
Gun rights groups have long opposed these kinds of laws.
They argue that trigger locks can fail, that mandatory
storage can put a gun out of reach in an emergency, and that
such measures infringe on Second Amendment rights.
``It's clearly a tragedy, but it's not something that's
widespread,'' said Larry Pratt, a spokesman and former
executive director of Gun Owners of America. ``To base public
policy on occasional mishaps would be a grave mistake.''
In Kansas City, Sha'Quille's family is trying to come to
grips with her death and the murder charge facing Mr. Block.
In interviews, several relatives said they did not believe he
deserved to be convicted of felony murder, but some
questioned his judgment in leaving a loaded gun out while he
slept as well as his actions after he discovered that his
daughter was grievously wounded.
According to court records, Mr. Block told the police that
immediately after the shooting, he went to the bathroom,
wrapped the gun in a shirt and put it into a vent in the
floor. He then ran outside carrying his dying daughter and
yelled for a neighbor to call for help. He was also charged
with evidence tampering.
Sha'Quille's mother, Montorre Kornegay, said that she had
recently separated from Mr. Block after more than five years
together, but that they remained close. She said he loved the
girl, whose first word was ``Daddy.'' When he called Ms.
Kornegay from jail, he told her he was sorry and talked about
how much he missed Sha'Quille.
The girl was just 2, but wanted to be older, telling people
she was already 5. She would run through the house, playing
her own private game of peekaboo, relatives said. In a
cacophony of squeaky children at home, relatives could always
distinguish Sha'Quille's low, raspier voice. One day, she'll
be a singer, they told one another.
``What happened was wrong,'' Ms. Kornegay said. She said
that she did not think Mr. Block deserved to face a murder
charge, but that he had behaved irresponsibly. ``Why didn't
you stay up and watch her?''
Parents, police officers and neighbors from Georgia to
California are asking similar painful questions this week.
Here are some of their stories.
`Stay With Me'
In 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at
the hands of young children and teenagers, according to
Everytown's database. During the week in April when
Sha'Quille and the other children died, there were at least
five other accidental shootings by children and teenagers.
Alysee Defee, 13, was shot in the armpit with a 20-gauge
shotgun she had used for turkey hunting in Floyd County, Ind.
Zai Deshields, 4, pulled a handgun out of a backpack at her
grandmother's home in Arlington, Tex., and shot her uncle in
the leg.
A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely
to be 3 years old, the statistics show.
Holston Cole was 3, a boy crackling with energy who would
wake before dawn, his pastor said. He loved singing ``Jesus
Loves Me'' and bouncing inside the inflatable castle in his
family's front yard in Dallas, Ga.
About 7 a.m. on April 26, he found a .380-caliber
semiautomatic pistol in his father's backpack, according to
investigators. The gun fired, and Holston's panicked father,
David, called 911. Even before a dispatcher could speak, Mr.
Cole wailed ``No, no!'' into the phone, according to a
redacted recording.
Mr. Cole pleaded for his 3-year-old son to hold on until
the ambulance could arrive: ``Stay with me, Holston,'' he can
be heard saying on a 911 tape, his voice full of desperation.
``Can you hear me? Daddy loves you. Holston. Holston, please.
Please.''
[[Page S2647]]
Holston was pronounced dead that morning.
The local authorities have been weighing what can be a
difficult decision for prosecutors and the police after these
shootings: Whether to charge a stricken parent or family
member with a crime. While laws vary among states, experts
said decisions about prosecution hinge on the specific
details and circumstances of each shooting. What may be
criminal neglect in one child's death may be legally seen as
a tragic mistake in another.
Officials with the Paulding County Sheriff's Office have
suggested that they expect Mr. Cole to face, at most, a
charge of reckless conduct.
``Anything that we do, criminally speaking, is not going to
hold a candle to the pain that this family feels,'' said Sgt.
Ashley Henson, a spokesman for the sheriff's office. Sergeant
Henson said investigators had sensed early on that the
shooting was accidental. ``You want to be able to protect
your family and take care of your family, but on the same
hand, you've got to be safe with your weapons,'' he said.
Some gun control groups have urged states and district
attorneys to prosecute such cases more aggressively, saying
that, grief aside, people need to be held responsible for
what are easily preventable deaths.
Brent Moxey, the pastor who officiated at Holston's
funeral, said the boy's father was already haunted. ``I think
he runs the scenario over and over and over in his mind.''
Mr. Moxey said the family--which did not respond to a message
left at their home seeking comment--was still asking for
privacy.
About 1,000 mourners attended Holston's funeral on April
30, remembering a boy who loved superheroes and would
sometimes wrestle cardboard boxes. The day he died, he spent
time alongside his mother, Haley, as she read the Bible,
playing with the highlighter pen she used to note passages,
Mr. Moxey said.
``This little boy loved to tinker and to play, and he loved
to get into things,'' Mr. Moxey said, describing the very
impulse that probably led to Holston's death. ``He loved to
figure out how stuff works.''
A Ringing Purse
In Indianapolis, Kanisha Shelton would stay protectively
near her 2-year-old son, Kiyan, watchful of the stray dogs
known to roam through the neighborhood.
But on the night of April 20, Ms. Shelton stepped away from
the boy, leaving him in the kitchen while she was upstairs.
She had placed her purse out of his reach on the kitchen
counter, but when her phone started ringing, the boy
apparently pushed a chair close to the counter, climbed onto
it and reached for the purse, according to an account from a
cousin, John Pearson. There was also a .380-caliber Bersa
pistol in it.
Just after 9 p.m., Ms. Shelton heard a loud bang and rushed
downstairs. There, in the kitchen, she found Kiyan lying on
the floor, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest. He was
rushed to a local children's hospital, where he was
pronounced dead.
Ms. Shelton's mother, who answered her daughter's
cellphone, said the family did not want to speak about the
death. No criminal charges have been filed.
The police in Indianapolis said such scenes were becoming
more common. ``The mother was obviously very shaken up,''
Capt. Richard Riddle said. Indeed, on Sunday night, another
child, 10 years old, died in what the police say appears to
have been another accidental shooting.
A 2013 investigation by The New York Times of children
killed with firearms found that accidental shootings like
these were being vastly undercounted by official tabulations,
and were occurring about twice as often as records said.
Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency physician and a
researcher at the University of California, Davis, who
studies the public health effects of gun violence, said that
nearly everyone--from toddlers to adults--can fail to
accurately distinguish toy guns from real guns, loaded guns
from unloaded ones.
``That doesn't stop them from playing with it,'' he said.
Mr. Pearson said he sympathized with Ms. Shelton and
thought of Kiyan's death as a tragic accident. ``It was up on
the counter, so I do think she thought she put the gun away,
out of the baby's reach,'' Mr. Pearson said. ``She's going to
be in a living hell.''
Essie Jones, who lives across the street, said Ms. Shelton
had recently taught Kiyan to ride a small bicycle with
training wheels, guiding him on the bike in the driveway.
``They'd be up in the yard playing,'' she said. ``He was very
happy.''
In a condolence book online, Dianna Mitchell-Wright, who
identified herself as ``Auntie,'' wrote of her anguish over
losing the boy she had nicknamed ``My Main Man.''
``All I have are memories,'' she said, ``and your pictures
in my cellphone.''
Anguished Goodbyes
The coffin that held Za'veon was no bigger than a piece of
carry-on luggage, and it was so light that two pallbearers
easily carried it through the packed St. Paul Missionary
Baptist Church in Bermuda, La.
His full name was Za'veon Amari Williams, but to his family
in Natchitoches, the 3-year-old was known as Baby Zee. On
April 22, he found a pistol and shot himself in the head,
according to Detective John Greely of the Natchitoches Police
Department. When paramedics arrived, they found the mother
cradling the boy and crying that he was not breathing,
according to KSLA News 12.
The police arrested a companion of the mother, Alverious
Demars, 22, on charges of negligent homicide and obstruction
of justice. Detective Greely said that the police believed
that the pistol belonged to Mr. Demars, and that he hid it
after the toddler shot himself. The police have not found the
weapon.
``As a responsible adult it's his obligation to secure
that--to make sure a child does not get ahold of it,''
Detective Greely said, explaining why Mr. Demars had been
arrested.
The family declined to speak, but in a Facebook post, the
boy's mother, Destiny Williams, wrote that she had not been
able to sleep and was a ``useless sad waste.'' ``I can't take
life,'' she wrote. ``Why is it so cruel and unrelenting and
unforgiving.''
The funerals for these children were filled with a similar
anguish.
At the funeral for Baby Zee, the wails and screams grew so
loud during a final moment of goodbye that ushers closed the
church doors to give the family privacy. In Georgia,
Holston's father tearfully read a letter that reflected on
how the family used to sing ``Jesus Loves Me.'' At the Kansas
City funeral for Sha'Quille, family members crumpled as they
looked into the coffin, shaking with tears or kissing her.
The day after Sha'Quille was buried, her maternal
grandmother, Pamala Kornegay, reflected on the girl who was
missing from the cluster of grandchildren who sat coloring on
her living room floor. Ms. Kornegay said she was not angry
with Sha'Quille's father.
Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, the article included harrowing stories
like this one:
Sha'Quille Kornegay, 2 years old, was buried in a pink
coffin, her favorite doll by her side and a tiara
strategically placed to hide the self-inflicted gunshot wound
to her forehead. She had been napping in bed with her father
late last month when she discovered the 9-millimeter handgun
he often kept under his pillow in his Kansas City, Missouri
home. It was equipped with a laser sight that lit up like the
red lights on her cousins' sneakers. Her father told the
police he woke to see Sha'Quille by his bed, bleeding and
crying, the gun at her feet. A bullet had pierced her skull.
On the night of April 20th, Kanisha Shelton had placed her
purse out of her 2-year-old son Kiyan's reach on the kitchen
counter, but when her phone started ringing, the boy
apparently pushed a chair close to the counter, climbed onto
it and reached for the purse. There was also a .380-caliber
Beretta pistol in it. Just after 9 p.m., Ms. Shelton heard a
loud bang and rushed downstairs. There, in the kitchen, she
found Kiyan lying on the floor, bleeding from a gunshot wound
to the chest. The police in Indianapolis said such scenes
were becoming more common.
As someone who has advocated for commonsense protections against gun
violence for decades and now as a Senator from Connecticut, where we
know all too well the horrors of gun violence and the deep wounds and
death they can wreak on innocent children, and especially as a parent
of four children who have been those ages, these stories, for me, are
truly heartrending and gut-wrenching. My heart goes out to the families
of these children and the families of countless other children who were
lost as a result of these gun deaths--too many such families too often
and so many of them preventable.
Last year, there were 278 unintentional shootings by young children
or teenagers, most of them having no idea what they were doing. In the
week at the end of this April when four toddlers shot themselves, at
least five other children and teenagers accidentally shot themselves or
other people.
Indepth investigations have strongly suggested that these shootings
are significantly undercounted because of differing rules across the
country and jurisdictions about how such deaths are to be reported.
Some areas designate any death in which one person shoots another as a
homicide, even if the shooter is 2 years old and has no intent to kill.
The gun lobby relies on these misleading statistics to oppose laws
that could reduce and prevent these kinds of heart-wrenching stories
and deaths, such as safe storage laws or technology such as trigger
locks. How could they be opposed? The gun lobby argues that these
deaths are vanishingly rare, outpaced by other causes of child
mortality. Of course, they perpetuate the misinformation by continuing
to oppose any research, any fact-finding into gun violence by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, continuing to even block
our ability to better understand the problem, let alone address it.
I continue to have great difficulty understanding the anti-safety
advocacy of these groups. Time and again in American history we have
recognized that products posing a risk to consumers--particularly to
children--require regulation to make them as safe
[[Page S2648]]
as possible, no matter what the product, no matter what the industry.
That has been the American way. We put seatbelts in cars and require
drivers to learn what they are doing in obtaining a license. We put
childproof caps on medicine bottles and dangerous household products,
even if they have domestic uses. If we have taken concrete steps to
ensure that children can't open a bottle of aspirin, I am baffled that
we can't do more to prevent these violent deaths. Why aren't we doing
everything we can to make sure that children can't kill themselves or
others or injure themselves or others with firearms?
There is no lack of ideas for how to remedy this situation. President
Obama recently announced that as part of the White House's anti-gun
violence initiative, he will move forward to promote the development of
smart gun technology which is designed to ensure that no one except the
owner can fire it. Even if the gun makes it into the hands of someone
who should not have it, whether a child or a criminal, the gun will not
be accessible. Like other steps the President has outlined in the
absence of congressional action which remains sorely needed, this smart
gun initiative utilizes existing laws and resources to challenge
research, innovation, and enforcement toward more effectively cutting
down on gun violence. Surely, we have a consensus among the American
people, among gun owners, and among anybody belonging to groups that
seemingly oppose these commonsense measures that we need to do more and
do it better to prevent these child deaths.
On smart guns in particular, the White House will provide guidance
for enhancing safety technology and help to manufacture and test smart
firearms and to facilitate their purchase by State and local
governments. Working in partnership with private sector innovators and
local jurisdictions, this initiative holds tremendous promise.
Even while smart guns that depend on advanced technology are being
developed, existing mechanisms provide remedies as well--low-tech
remedies. Trigger locks and indicators of whether a gun is loaded are
in widespread use today. Studies have suggested that a third of
accidental deaths could be prevented by the use of childproof safety
locks and loading indicators. Our laws should encourage and even
require their adoption. States around the country have also developed a
variety of safe storage bills that prohibit storing firearms in places
that are accessible to children. Tragic experience has shown us that,
as important as it is for families to discuss guns with their children,
simply admonishing them to avoid going near guns won't work,
particularly when the children are too young to understand what guns
are and what they can do, and, most especially, when they are playing
with other children in other families' homes, where those guns may be
accessible and loaded.
The answer is to insist that adults take responsibility. They need to
be held responsible for keeping firearms off limits, which is really
the only realistic option to cut down these tragic deaths of children.
Laws requiring that kind of responsibility and accountability are
supported by two-thirds of Americans. Unfortunately, the gun lobby has
continually, constantly, insistently, and consistently opposed progress
in these areas. Their steadfast opposition has also prevented the
Consumer Product Safety Commission--which has a praiseworthy track
record of success keeping children safe from hazards and ranging from
lead in toys to dangerous cribs--from regulating firearms or even
issuing guidance about how they could be designed more safely for
children.
I have been coming to the floor of the Senate for a number of years
to speak about the need for legislation to address the gun violence
epidemic in this country, clearly a public health crisis. If there were
a flu epidemic or another kind of contagious disease causing 30,000
deaths a year, we would have urgent, drastic action. We need to do the
right thing. There are stories reported such as those last week of the
unspeakable horror of a child too young to understand what is happening
who encounters a gun and uses it, such as Sha'Quille, Kiyan, and
Holston Cole, a 3-year-old boy with crackling energy, who would wake
right before dawn. His pastor said: He loved singing ``Jesus Loves
Me.'' He put a gun to his head and, unknowingly, pulled the trigger. We
can avoid that type of tragedy. We can do better, and we must act.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
____________________