Several months ago I read about a female teacher who left her gun in a stall in the restroom after going to the bathroom.
The simple truth is that the human mind is not designed to juggle all the kinds of things we must remember to function in modern life--certainly not all at once. A lapse in awareness/attention or memory is inevitable for everyone at some time or another.
If you are lucky, you just misplace you keys or your glasses, or you forget where you parked your car at the shopping mall.
If you're unlucky, you forget that your baby or toddler is asleep in the backseat as you hurry to make it to work on time, or as you mentally rehearse the presentation you're supposed to give 40 minutes later, so instead of dropping him off, you leave him to die horribly in the oven the car becomes when parked in the sun with the windows closed.
Even otherwise loving and responsible parents can suffer such a lapse leading to catastrophic consequences. Even experienced, well-trained armed guards can do so, too. All it takes is a moment's internal or external distraction. A distracted mother shopping with lively little ones gets shot to death because her toddler pulls her gun out of her purse as she checks the price on something (this happened recently), or a parent forgets that he left his loaded gun in the nightstand when he woke up that morning after insufficient sleep.
This is why having so many guns everywhere is a tragedy waiting to happen, even if there are no violent, vicious potential mass murderers anywhere near. This is why so many kids kill themselves or others with guns. Yes, sometimes the kid makes a extraordinary effort to access a loaded gun supposedly hidden away or beyond his reach. And sometimes some adult is so stupid, careless, or impaired by drugs or alcohol that he doesn't even have the sense to try to keep his guns out of easy access by kids.
But even when the person is someone who *means* to take every precaution, someone who *almost* always does everything right to keep his guns out of the reach of children, with so many guns all over the place, if even a tiny percentage of the huge numbers of "responsible" owners, recognizably "good guys with guns," have a momentary lapse in attention or memory caused by exhaustion, stress, or distraction--all conditions that are pretty much pervasive and constant in modern life--then that will translate into a significant number of situations in which a kid gets hold of a loaded gun and shoots himself or someone else.
With so many guns around, it is statistically inevitable that such a tragic outcome will occur--and that those occurrences will not be all that rare.
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