If there is any thought that might help soothe the sorrow of a child’s death, perhaps it’s the prayer that the death might help prevent another.
The accidental shooting death of 3-year-old Nicholas Evick devastated his parents, stunned neighbors and acquaintances and left Kannapolis investigators struggling to understand how it could have happened. How could a toddler gain access to a loaded handgun locked in a cabinet?
We likely will never know for certain, according to one detective. But one thing we do know, with sad certainty, is that all too soon this story will play itself out again somewhere else when a fateful convergence of forces puts another toddler in harm’s way.
Gun-rights advocates often contend that safe-storage laws accomplish little, other than to put their owners at a potentially fatal disadvantage when threatened by an intruder. They successfully opposed a safe-storage measure considered this year in the state legislature. Some might see this tragedy as evidence that they’re right — that another law would make little difference when the gun owner apparently was already following safe-storage practices and a child still obtained the weapon.
But what it more aptly illustrates is the wrenching lesson that, where youngsters are concerned, adults can never be too vigilant. Insatiable curiosity, coupled with an increasing mastery of their physical world, makes toddler behavior precocious and utterly unpredictable. In the blink of an eye, they can put themselves in peril.
In this instance, that peril involved a loaded gun. Next time, however, it may be a gate left ajar at an unattended swimming pool. Or a cigarette lighter or box of matches carelessly left near a combustible curtain. Or an unlocked car left idling for a moment in a driveway. Or rat poison left underneath the kitchen sink. Or a tricycle that spurts into the path of a car when a parent’s attention is momentarily diverted.
The possibilities for misadventure are endless — and as each tragedy reminds us anew, you simply can’t be too careful where kids are concerned.
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