Guns for Kids Marketing Debate Ignited by Latest Child Death
...At about 1 p.m. the boy used a rifle that was given to him as a gift to shoot his sister in a moment when his mother stepped outside.
"The weapon is a single shot .22 caliber rifle," Cumberland County police spokesman Billy Gregory told ABCNews.com. "One of the parents was at home at the time of the shooting. She had stepped outside the residence. She was cleaning and stepped outside to empty a mop bucket, and heard the shot and ran back inside."
Gregory said that the case is currently a death investigation, and detectives are waiting for findings from the coroner. When you're dealing with grieving parents and a young child who shot his sister, there are a lot of muddy waters we have to wait for to clear," he said.
Cumberland County Coroner Gary White told The Associated Press that the rifle was kept in a corner and the family didn't realize a bullet was left inside it.
"It's a Crickett," White said. "It's a little rifle for a kid. ... The little boy's used to shooting the little gun."
The Cricket model was called "My First Rifle" and is manufactured by Keystone Sporting Arms. The shooting in Kentucky on Tuesday and the one in Washington on Wednesday were the latest in a series of shootings in the last month involving young children. In early April, Brandon Holt, 4, was shot by his 6-year-old friend in New Jersey while the two were playing a game of "pretend shooting," also with a .22 caliber rifle. The following day, a 4-year-old boy in Lebanon, Tenn., fired a gun that killed his mother.
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