Professor Robert Weisberg weighs in on the uneven enforcement of “child access prevention laws” meant to keep children from gaining access to their parents’ guns for Slate.

Last week, in what’s actually become a pretty standard week in America, two young children shot two other children dead with unsecured guns. Nothing about this is a surprise, really—89 percent of unintentional shooting deaths of children take place in the home, when children are playing with a loaded gun while their parents are out. American children are 9 times more likely to be killed by a gun than are kids in other developed nations. There are more than 310 million guns in the United States, and more than 30 percent of Americans report that they have a gun in their home. Those guns are not always stored securely. A RAND Corporation study showed that about 1.4 million households (with an estimated 2.6 million children) had firearms stored unlocked and either loaded or with ammunition nearby.

A pretty standard week in America. Sunday, a 2-year-old in South Carolina shot his grandmother in the back while he was riding in the backseat of a car. He found the .357 revolver in the pocket on the back of the front seat and fired the weapon.

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And so I spent the week asking prosecutors why they thought CAP laws aren’t enforced. Their responses echoed the media narrative: No jury would convict someone who had already suffered such a loss, and accidental shootings, even those in which weapons were improperly stored, are largely viewed as misfortune rather than misconduct in many places. These are elected positions, and there is very little public appetite for such prosecutions. As Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School explained to me in an email, it’s easier to go after negligent parents for leaving their children in a hot car than for leaving their gun accessible: “Ironically, [hot-car cases] are prosecuted more often than the gun cases and often lead to some Child Protective Services intervention.” Heck, we go after parents who let their children walk through the neighborhood more aggressively.
Weisberg thinks that’s because we have trouble understanding negligence when it comes to guns. “There’s nothing antisocial per se about the background fact of keeping kids in a car,” he points out; the problem comes about when the parent forgets the kid is there. Similarly, many Americans just don’t think of parents who leave guns lying around as negligent because, as with cars, “there is never any abstract risk with having guns in the house, nothing the least antisocial about it. Storing a gun is not only normal life—it’s better than normal life if we see it as sacred or a form of home defense.”