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Washington: On Monday afternoon three-year-old Elijah Walker was playing with another boy, 11, in a suburb of Detroit's blighted east side.
One of them apparently found a gun. A shot was fired. Little Elijah was hit in the face and died sitting in the front seat of a parked car. Police are investigating.
A cousin told the Detroit Free Press that the family called Elijah the "miracle baby" because he had thrived so well after a premature birth.
"He played and played and played," Tameka Cash said. "He was a happy baby."
Before dawn on Tuesday 2200 kilometres to the south in Miami, Florida, Darnel Munday, 3, woke up before his parents, whose bed he was sharing, slipped over to the night stand and reached in for an iPad.
Instead his hand first settled on a loaded 9mm Glock and he shot himself in the head.
Or at least that's what his parents say. Police are still investigating. It is not yet known if Darnel will survive his injuries.
"He's my everything, my only child," his mother, Dorphise Jean, told the Miami Herald as she stood outside a nearby hospital, her grey T-shirt still covered with her son's blood. "Don't bash us as parents, because we're good parents. I can't even talk about it. I heard a bang and jumped out of bed."
She said both she and her partner, Darnel's father, owned guns.
The two incidents are unrelated apart from the terrible nature of the injuries, which are not uncommon in the US.
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun regulation group that evolved out of survivors of the massacre at Sandy Hook, about 2 million American children live in a house with an unsecured gun.
Meanwhile, America's most influential lobby group, the National Rifle Association, campaigns steadfastly not only against the regulation of the types of guns people may own, and against universal background checks before gun purchases, but even against the use of trigger locks or other safe storage regulations.
Though comprehensive national figures do not exist, Everytown, estimates that between January 1 and April 30 this year there were at least 164 accidental child shootings in the United States.
In many of these cases children are injured or killed by other children who find guns and play with them, as was apparently the case in Elijah Walker's shooting.
But as Fairfax Media has reported, adults are also often injured or killed by children or even toddlers who find or handle firearms.
Just after Christmas last year Veronica Rutledge, 29, was shopping at Walmart when her two-year-old son unzipped the special gun compartment in her purse, took hold of a pistol and shot her dead while her three young nieces looked on.
The Miami child, who was to start pre-kindergarten classes in the northern hemisphere autumn, was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital by his father, where he remained in a critical condition undergoing surgery late on Tuesday morning.
The child's mother, Dorphise Jean, said her son climbed onto a chair, then reached up into a top dresser drawer and found the gun. She said he was looking for an iPad to play video games.
Police were interviewing both parents late on Tuesday morning, but weren't willing to confirm the child shot himself.
"All we know is we have a child who was shot," said Miami Police Detective Frederica Burden. "How or why is being investigated."
The Detroit News noted that two others were killed in the city in recent months while someone played with a gun – a 14-year-old boy fatally shot a 14-year-old girl in January, and a nine-year-old boy accidentally shot himself in December.
The prevalence of guns in the US has become a source of controversy as the number of accidents involving children and mass killings rise.
Mass public shootings in the United States have increased in frequency from 1.1 a year to 4.5 a year since the 1970s, a new report by the Congressional Research Services shows.
The report found that in the 1970s, mass public shootings killed roughly six people a year and injured two. By the 2010s, there were an average of 33 deaths in mass shootings each year, with 28 additional people injured.
Despite the growing public outrage for needless gun deaths in the US, Congress has been reluctant to act on new restrictions. President Barack Obama said recently that one of his greatest regrets was his inability to get new gun-control laws on the books following the Sandy Hook shootings in Connecticut that killed 28 people including 20 children.
with Reuters, TNS
