“The kids are OK.” That’s host Gayle King reporting on CBS Morning News about a video taken by an overhead drone in which 7- and 9-year-old brothers are seen waving around a loaded gun as deputies from the Bernalillo County, New Mexico sheriff’s office yell for them to put it down.
King warns viewers that the video is “shocking,” but wants to reassure them.
The incident reportedly began when the children’s mother walked into a room and found them playing with the weapon. She confronted the boys and they ran outside, which is when she called 911. There is some back and forth with the deputies, with the boys first claiming they don’t have a gun and then finally the deputies shooting off a blank round apparently in the hopes of scaring them. The officers then rush in to take the gun away. The video is presented as evidence of the effectiveness of drone use in law enforcement.
But viewers of the video had questions. The local news station said many people wanted to know why the boys weren’t arrested. Because of their age, the boys would be placed in the custody of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department and then placed back either with their parents or with other relatives, according to Sheriff John Allen.
There is plenty of evidence to support this account. According to Bernalillo County Sen. Nicole Tobiassen, police have been called to the home 180 times. One week before this incident, court documents show that a man (who is the father of another child living in the house and also a convicted felon) pointed a loaded gun at the children and threatened to kill them. Their mother called the police and got an order of protection against the man. He fled the house, and the police found him without the gun, but that may be the same gun the boys were playing with.
Which leads to a lot of other questions. One of them is why are the kids still living in a house with this kind of regular violence? The sheriff told the local news station: “I think with the way the state system is, I believe it’s a system of failure. This is a case that is going to highlight that. That shows that these children are not being taken care of, from their home and their family.” He said that if they do get removed, “they are released right back to the family, or someone that is familiar with the family, that does the children no good at all.”
In recent years there has been more attention paid to the parents of teens who engage in gun violence. Last year, Jennifer and James Crumbley were each sentenced to 10 years in prison after their 15-year-old son Ethan killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School in Michigan. The parents, the judge found, did not do enough to secure their gun and did not pay attention to their child’s mental health struggles.
But a surprising number of young children are killed when their parents (who often are engaged in criminal activity or who have substance use and/or mental illness problems) leave loaded firearms around the house. These cases don’t involve anyone outside of the family and they don’t get the kind of press attention that school shootings do, but they are a sign of something very serious going on. In December, Jessinya Mina of Fresno, California, was killed by her two-year-old son who picked up her boyfriend’s loaded gun. Earlier that month, also in California, a 7-year-old accidentally killed his 2-year-old brother after finding a gun in the glovebox of a truck they were in.
According to a group called Everytown for Gun Safety, there were at least 411 unintentional shootings by children in 2023, the worst year since the group started tracking in 2015. And there were at least 360 unintentional shootings by children in 2024, including 136 fatalities.
At Lives Cut Short, an American Enterprise Institute project to document child maltreatment fatalities, we have found that about 10% of the cases logged so far have involved firearms and most of those have involved parental negligence (as opposed to a parent purposefully shooting a child).
Yes, of course, there are teens who will go to great lengths to get a hold of their parents’ weapons and use them on others, but young children don’t know what guns are, what they can do or the harm they can cause. Parents who are too out of it to realize that they have left a loaded firearm on the coffee table, or who don’t care enough to put it away, pose a serious threat to young children. And so do the public agencies that ignore these dangers. So no, Gayle, the kids are not OK.