SAN ANTONIO — A baby was fatally shot by a toddler inside a car parked outside a San Antonio medical center, authorities said, marking the latest accidental shooting involving children.
A woman, a three-year-old, a two-year-old and an infant were all in a parked SUV outside the Audie L. Murphy VA Medical Center, authorities said in a news conference, according to CBS affiliate KENS. There was a loaded long gun "in the very rear of the vehicle," police chief William McManus said, and one of the toddlers got ahold of the weapon and fired it, striking and killing the infant, who was 10 or 11 months old.
Police have not said who owns the gun. No charges have been filed.
Such shootings have been on the rise in recent years. Hundreds of young children in the U.S. have been killed while playing with guns in the past two decades, according to a 2023 study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study found that most of those deaths were preventable, since they involved guns that were stored unlocked and loaded.
Unintentional firearm deaths made up around a quarter of all firearm deaths over this time period in children under 10 years old, according to other CDC data.
Such shootings are most likely to happen at home, CBS News previously reported, and are most likely to involve handguns.
There were at least 36 unintentional shootings by children in Texas in 2023, according to Everytown. Fourteen of those shootings were fatal. A record number of children died in unintentional shootings that year, Everytown said, with 411 incidents resulting in 158 deaths and 269 injuries.
While federal law in most cases prohibits anyone under 18 from owning a handgun, not all states have laws requiring that a gun be stored safely. Texas has no specific state law about how firearms should be stored, but it "is unlawful to store, transport or abandon an unsecured firearm in a place where children are likely to be and can obtain access to the firearm," according to state laws.
