[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5549-5551]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 5550]]

     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 9-1-1. 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 9-1-1 tape, his voice full of 
     desperation. ``Can you hear me? Daddy loves you. Holston. 
     Holston, please. Please.''
       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

[[Page 5551]]

     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.
  In-depth 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 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.


  

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