A 3-year-old girl accidentally killed her one-year-old sister with a semi-automatic pistol in Texas on Sunday, US police said, in the latest example of the tragic consequences of firearms proliferation to people.
The 3-year-old escaped the control of an adult and “gained access to a loaded semi-automatic handgun. Relatives heard a shot. They burst into the room and found the 4-year-old girl lying on the floor and unresponsive,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters.
The young victim was found dead at the scene.
“This appears to be a tragic new story in which a child gained access to a gun and touched someone else,” the police chief added.
The United States has more individual guns than residents, about 400 million: One in three adults owns at least one gun, and almost one in two adults lives in a household where a gun is found.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were more than 44,000 gun-related deaths in the United States last year, half of them from suicide and the other half from homicide, accident or self-defense.
And Texas (South), a massive state of 30 million people, is also one of the easiest places to get a gun.
Carrying guns is legal there in the name of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.