A Gun in the House - Tragedy Hits East Brunswick

A 12-year old boy is dead in East Brunswick, New Jersey after he and a friend somehow discovered a gun in the house and were playing with it. I cannot imagine the grief and horror that all the families are going through, and the lasting damage this incident will cause to all.

Unfortunately, this is a scene that will continue to be repeated as long as irresponsible people have loaded guns. The only safe place for a gun is inside a locked case, with a trigger lock attached – UNLOADED. Some would argue that this renders the gun useless for self-defense – however, in my opinion, there is more of a chance of a loaded gun being used improperly than ever being needed to protect the lives of the home’s occupants.

Years ago, my daughter played a role in a video produced by the Piscataway Police department. In this video, she and a friend are playing in her home after school. In the garage, her father has left a gun on a workbench – the scene indicates that perhaps he had been intending to clean it. The two kids are fascinated with the gun, start to play with it, and, of course, it goes off. The video actually incorporates a scene of a child being shot in the head. A chilling similarity to this incident.

In another story on this video, a father hears a noise in the house, and pulls his loaded gun out of the nightstand. He creeps downstairs to the source of the noise, and in the dark, ends up shooting his own son, who had dropped a glass in the kitchen.

The video concludes with members of the Piscataway Police Department demonstrating how to use inexpensive trigger locks to secure guns.

The video was shown many times on cable television, and at schools. At my daughter’s school, permission slips were needed from parents, due to the frightening and graphic images. Later, my daughter and her science fair partner would win a prize in a state science contest for proposing the “Gun Safety Sensor,” a sensor embedded in the handle of a gun that would recognize only the owner’s fingerprints to become operational. At the time, she was told it was a great idea, but no such technology existed, but recently I’ve heard that the New Jersey Institute of Technology is working on just such a sensor.

However, until the day when there are such built-in safety features for guns – and all guns have them, it will be up to the gun owner to properly store the weapon in such a way that tragedies like this can never occur.