8-year-old boy fatally shoots 1-year-old girl with father’s gun in Florida
An eight-year-old boy shot dead a baby and wounded her toddler sister while playing with his father’s gun in Florida last weekend.
According to Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons, the father, 45-year-old Roderick Randall, was detained and charged with concealing evidence, unlawful possession of a firearm, and culpable negligence.
The tragedy happened in a motel where Randall met his fiancée. He had brought his son, while his girlfriend had brought along her two-year-old twins and her one-year-old daughter.
“He pulls the gun from the holster, starts playing with it and fires a round into the one-year-old toddler, ultimately killing the one-year-old. The bullet then goes through and strikes one of the two-year-old toddlers who’s injured but is expected to recover,” the report read.
The infant girl’s death is just the most recent in a horrifying string of similar mishaps; when the father came home, he removed the gun and an unknown substance, which may have been narcotics, from the room before the police arrived.
Randall had a criminal record that prohibited him from carrying a pistol.
“Every year, hundreds of children in the United States gain access to unsecured, loaded guns in closets and nightstand drawers, in backpacks and purses, or just left out,” according to a recent report by Everytown for Gun Safety.
Further widely, as per the website Gun Violence Archive, weapons are responsible for about 40,000 deaths annually in the United States, including suicides.
