Oregon 2-Year-Old Shot in Stomach

via Baldr

The 2-year-old boy named Payton survived the shooting, which happened in Dallas on Friday night. He was released from the hospital on Saturday afternoon.
Johnnie Flow said she bought the gun for protection in February after somebody threatened her family. She kept it in her purse.
Normally she said it’s not loaded, but when her kids found it there were bullets in the gun. The purse was sitting on the back of a couch in the family's front room.
Both she and her husband were home when the shooting happened. She immediately took Payton to the hospital and said she was afraid he was going to die.

Is it my imagination or are these kid-shootings on the rise. Recently we read the yearly stats for child gunshot deaths, but they don't seem to match the stories we've picked up on lately in the main stream. I realize today's story in Oregon is just a non-lethal bullet to the stomach of a 2-year-old, which means it hardly counts for anything, but even the gun deaths like the little girl in North Carolina the other day seem to be disproportionately high of late.
But, what's the difference if it 37 or 3700, the pro-gun apologists will shrug it off as statistically insignificant. My contention is, you can say that if you're a hard-hearted, biased gun fanatic, but in this case it's not quantity that counts but quality.
The quality of these shootings is that they are preventable. Every one of them is the result of unforgiveable negligence, usually on the part of the gun-owning parents. We're talking about kids under 10 now. And in almost every case there are either no charges or minor ones brought against the real criminals.
Why would anyone oppose the forfeiture of gun rights for people who demonstrate the capacity to do something so dangerous? Is it a safe assumption that people learn from their mistakes? Is a sincere expression of contrition, like in this story, sufficient to convince?
I don't think so.  I say the MikeB is King rule, formerly known as the one-strike-you're-out rule must apply. I believe most people who make serious mistakes don't learn from them, they repeat them.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.