Three-year-old Gavin Stiles found a pistol in a black leather pouch in his parent’s Western Slope closet. An 8-year-old boy in Trinidad found a loaded gun in a car he and his brother were left in alone. What happened next shows Colorado is not immune to the tragedies that claim hundreds of children across the U.S.: Gavin accidentally shot himself, and the Trinidad boy shot his brother. Both gunshots were fatal.
Since 2014, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, at least four minors have been unintentionally killed by a firearm in Colorado. The study, which depended on police and local media reports, also found four minors were wounded by accidental gunfire.
For prosecutors and advocates across Colorado, these deaths raise difficult questions while showing an ideological divide on how to create safer communities.
Jaden Rahm was killed while driving with a group of his friends on a lunch break from Yuma High School in 2014. Investigators concluded that a shotgun Rahm had in the back of his car accidentally discharged while a friend was moving it. District Attorney Brittny Lewton was approached by local law enforcement after the incident, but she decided not to file charges.
“It was very, very devastating to the community,” Lewton said.
At the time, Lewton wrote an open letter saying the incident “begs the question, especially in rural areas, that parents have the responsibility to teach or keep gun safety as a bigger priority. If there was a lesson to be learned, that was it.”
Gun ownership in Yuma is deeply ingrained in the culture, she explained, and introducing legislation that could potentially criminalize these incidents wouldn’t be productive.
“Resources could be better allocated by going into schools and education. They need more education, rather than punishing them,” Lewton said.
Colorado gun laws say charges can only be brought against people who knowingly, willingly or recklessly provide a child with a firearm, according to a report from nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
When children kill themselves or others with guns, “it comes down to the fact patterns or the circumstances of the case,” Robert Wareham, a Denver-based attorney, said of how the district attorney decides to proceed.
“The truth is it’s almost always apparent that no one wanted the child to be harmed,” said Timothy Bussey, a Colorado Springs criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor in El Paso and Teller counties. “Sometimes even when there is adequate protection to keep children away from the firearm, accidents can occur. I think DAs do consider the circumstances surrounding that.”
When families lose a child, “are (state prosecutors) going to press charges against them?” said Catherine Mortensen, a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association. “There’s no public safety benefit to be gained for locking these people up. ”
Both gun-rights and gun-control advocates agree that proper gun safety is necessary in preventing these kinds of deaths. In a report on accidental gun deaths of children, Everytown for Gun Safety concluded that most of these shootings could be avoided “if gun owners stored their guns responsibly and prevented children from accessing them.”
Colorado Ceasefire, a gun control advocacy group, has introduced Child Access Prevention laws to the legislature that reflect states that are more strict about this issue. But the legislation was rejected five times, said spokesman Tom Mauser. “The gun lobby fought us all the way.”
It was also rejected because “prosecutors don’t like to charge parents — they’ve suffered enough already,” Mauser said. “The second reason is gun owners don’t like to be told what to do with their gun.”
Advocates on both sides of the debate disagree on whether laws should be passed to regulate how people store their firearms at home.
“Handling a gun carelessly to cause injury to someone else is the same as handling any object to harm someone else,” said Dave Kopel, research director for the Independence Institute, a Denver-based think tank that Kopel says is nonpartisan but has a Libertarian outlook.
“Arguably, if you create a special act or law, you’re criminalizing behavior,” Bussey said.
Mauser said Colorado Ceasefire’s proposed legislation is focused on preventing these incidents, not prosecuting grieving parents.
