With shootings involving children on the rise, families asked to secure guns, step up safety
FORT WORTH, Texas - Tarrant County's pediatric hospital is urging parents to review safety at home after two shootings involving children who got unsecured guns.
Investigators are continuing to question everyone who was at an Arlington home early Tuesday morning, when police said 2-year-old Rio Carrington found a gun in his teenage brother’s bedroom.
The child died from his injuries after shooting himself in the face, according to police.
Arlington toddler dies after shooting himself with sibling's gun, police say
Arlington police say that the boy, who was about to turn 3, found a gun in his teenage sibling's room and accidentally fired it.
Four days before that, Fort Worth police responded to a shooting in the 2600 block of Aiken Lane, where investigators said a 2-year-old girl removed a gun from a drawer and fired it, injuring herself.
Toddler may have shot herself at Fort Worth home, police say
Fort Worth police are trying to determine how a 2-year-old girl ended up with a life-threatening gunshot wound.
"In 2022, Cook Children’s treated 45 children for gunshot injuries. Eight of them were fatal, and so this is something we see way too much," Dana Walraven said.
Walraven coordinates a gun safety initiative with Cook Children’s Medical Center. The project is called "Aim for Safety."
Walraven said, sadly, the cases that receive media coverage are just a glimpse of the growing numbers of children who wind up in emergency rooms after getting ahold of unsecured firearms.
"We want an open conversation to make sure children are taught how to be safe in a home that may have a gun, or if they’re visiting a home and come across a gun. What should I do? We want kids to stop we want them not to touch," she explained. "Now if you’re talking about a toddler, they are maybe not going to understand as much of the details, but that again is why we put precautions in place and have them safety locked."
The program, along with a call from police departments, is amplifying the plea for gun owners to use safety locks on guns kept in homes.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there were no charges or arrests in the Fort Worth or Arlington toddler shootings, and there are still questions about who was responsible for the firearms in both cases.
Walraven wants families to double down on the need for gun safety, especially where there are small children.
"It is really about looking at the numbers of children being injured in the majority of those at home are unintentional. There’s something we can do about that," she added.