A 4-year-old and 7-year-old were playing an innocent game of hide-and-seek Sunday evening in Maryland when the younger child found a loaded 9mm handgun. She pulled the weapon, a ghost gun, and shot herself in the arm, the Washington Post reports. The incident was one of two in recent days in which police say a child in the Washington, D.C., region came upon a weapon and shot themselves. The cases highlight alarming public safety trends nationwide that worry gun safety experts and police: the soaring pervasiveness of homemade, untraceable weapons known as ghost guns and the increase in unintentional shootings by children. “A 4-year-old is injured, and it could’ve been much worse,” said Prince George’s County Police Chief Malik Aziz. “We could be planning a funeral for a 4-year-old right now due to the recklessness and carelessness of an individual who obviously has no regard for such a deadly weapon, even when young children are around.”
Eight children a day are shot and injured or killed unintentionally by an unsecured firearm in the home, according to Brady United Against Gun Violence. “Guns are very present in our culture and in our country and in our neighborhoods, and they’re so present, they’re almost omnipresent that we don’t realize one in three Americans has a gun,” said Renee Davidson of Brady, who is from the same part of Montgomery County where a 3-year-old was shot in Maryland this week. “We need to act as if those are lethal objects that we need to protect safely, because they are.” Tsayhe issue grows more difficult when the guns are illegal. Law enforcement officials have raised alarms over the expanding prevalence of ghost guns and their use in violent crimes nationwide. Ghost guns are tough for investigators to track because they don’t have serial numbers that can be traced to their last owner as commercially manufactured guns do. From 2016 to 2021, there were more than 45,200 suspected privately made firearms law enforcement officials recovered from potential crime scenes, including nearly 700 homicides or attempted homicides, says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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