Why Americans Don't Treat Fatal Gun Negligence as a Crime

[A question I have often asked myself. Why do some people get arrested for negligence in accidental shooting cases, but others get off scott free? Seems to be a local ordinance issue having to do with gun-love. ---Bozo]
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By Amanda Gailey
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Kasey Wilson lives in rural Missouri. He is in his mid-twenties, married with children, and runs his own lawn care business. On October 28, 2013, as his kids played in the front yard with four-year-old Zoie Dougan, the daughter of a visiting friend, Wilson borrowed a rifle from next door, went into his backyard, closed one eye, and shot across the lawn toward a pile of trash. He didn't realize he had shot Zoie in the head until he heard screaming. By the time she arrived at the hospital by airlift she was dead, and her mother had already asked the police to go easy on her friend. "It was an accident," deputies report her saying.
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Police who interrogated Wilson noted the recklessness that led to Dougan's death. Even if children had not been playing outside, Wilson had fired his gun toward a highway. "If a vehicle or pedestrian were to walk or drive up [redacted road name] they could be seriously injured or killed by his carelessness," wrote one officer in his report. Yet Wilson was never prosecuted for the shooting. Christian County prosecutor Amy Fite went so far as to redact his name from documents. Because he faced no charges, nothing prevents Wilson from owning guns. The legal system, treating Dougan's death as a pure accident, holds no further consequences for Wilson.
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Every year many gun owners, like Wilson, unintentionally cause death and injury yet face no legal consequences. In criminal and civil courts, the legal system often fails to hold negligent gun owners accountable for such harm. Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit effort that combs through more than a thousand media sources to collect information about gun violence, has verified more than 1,500 accidental shooting incidents in 2014. Data on the legal outcomes of these shootings is sketchy, but many cases of unprosecuted unintentional shootings are available-dozens from the first two months of 2014 alone remain unprosecuted.
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The past decade has seen legal measures to prevent gun negligence systematically dismantled. The 2005 Protection of Legal Commerce in Arms Act statutorily inoculated gun manufacturers and dealers from most claims of negligence in gun deaths. This is even more dangerous than it may first sound. Many people unfamiliar with guns assume that they are designed with simple safeguards against unintentional shootings, but this is not always the case. Glock handguns, for example, have no external safety: If a round is chambered and the trigger is squeezed, the gun fires. As Aaron Walsh, a criminal defense attorney in Augusta, Georgia, put it, "With any other product in the world there would be no Glock company because they would be sued out of existence. You don't have a safety? That can't be right."
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Because the firearms industry enjoys exceptions from normal liability, more of the burden for preventing negligence falls to gun owners. Until recently, responsible gun ownership has to some extent been enforced through gatekeeping: State laws limit who can own guns and carry them in public. But advocates for expanded gun rights have been shifting away from an older gun lobby talking point-that we should stop passing new gun control laws and simply enforce the laws we already have-and toward a strategy of dismantling existing legal safeguards. The push for "constitutional carry"-gun carrying by anyone, anywhere, with no licensing required under the pretense that this is a right granted by the Constitution-has radically loosened restrictions on who can own guns and where they may carry them. In several states people may now carry guns on college campuses. In Michigan, guns may be carried openly at K-12 schools. In Iowa, a resident may not be denied a permit to carry a gun in public based on the fact that he or she is blind. In Georgia and other states, guns may be carried in churches and bars. In six states, resident adults may carry concealed handguns with no licensing or training required. Pediatricians in Florida are legally prohibited from asking new parents if they have guns in the home.
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With preventative measures falling apart, punishment seems the only remaining legal recourse for enforcing responsibility with guns. But we are not responding to negligence, even egregious negligence, as one might expect. Unintentional shootings frequently go unprosecuted because they don't always clearly rise to the level of crimes, explained Pete Theodocion, a criminal defense attorney in Augusta, Georgia. "If we are going to take away a person's liberty and put a person in a cage, we typically require that person to have the mindset of 'I'm going to do harm now' as opposed to just acting like a dumbass," he said.
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