Today’s story is the kind of thing that is every parent’s nightmare. We don’t want our children in danger or injured, and we want do all that we can to keep them safe.
And that’s part of why today’s story is so disturbing: a child was injured in a preventable gun accident.
Yes, it was preventable, but sadly it wasn’t prevented. Luke McCoy writes,
A loaded firearm brought to school by a student discharged inside a classroom at Freetown Elementary School on the morning of February 4, 2026, resulting in injury to the student who had brought the weapon.
Officers from the Anne Arundel County Police Department responded to the incident around 8:25 a.m. School officials stated that a student brought a handgun from home, and it discharged while in a classroom with other students present. The teacher acted quickly, securing the firearm and providing aid to the injured student before contacting school administrators and police.
No other students were physically harmed. The injured child was transported to a local hospital and is expected to recover from a non-life-threatening injury.
Now, I don’t know any of the people involved in this incident, and I don’t know how the child got their hands on a loaded firearm to take to school other than that an adult was charged with “leaving a loaded firearm accessible to a minor.”
Which gets me to the point for bringing this story to your attention. That point? That we should be better. Gun owners should be better.
As legal firearm owners, we have a responsibility to keep children away from loaded firearms without supervision (such as you taking your child to the range while teaching them to shoot) and to keep children safe.
Someone clearly didn’t do either of those things, and a child has been hospitalized because of that.
The good news, such as it is, is that no one died and that the situation wasn’t worse.
But the fact of the matter is that the situation should not have happened in the first place.
Know where your firearms are at all times, and have them secured in such a way that children cannot get to them (but also in such a way that you can access them quickly and safely should you need to).
This whole situation is horrible. I’m just glad that it wasn’t worse.
