Some ‘accidents’ happen because we call them that

IF YOU PLOW into an oncoming car because you’re too busy fiddling with your iPhone and scarfing down your gooey, super-sized burger to pay attention to the highway, you’re going to get a ticket.

Never mind that you didn’t intend to cause a wreck. You did, and so you have to pay for it.

That’s not simply because a reasonable, responsible person would have been able to avoid this “accident.” You have to pay because that’s what state law says.

In other cases, state law gives you a pass for your self-induced “accidents.”

If you sue the driver who plowed into you, he won’t be able to argue to the jury that you share some of the blame for your injuries because you weren’t wearing a seat belt. At least not in South Carolina.

Likewise in South Carolina, if you leave your loaded gun on the kitchen table and a child picks up what looks to him like a toy and shoots his little sister, nobody gets charged.

That’s not so different from what happened last month during a shopping trip in Harbison, when a North Augusta magistrate’s 4-year-old granddaughter shot herself in the chest with a gun she found in the judge’s purse. And so last week, officials announced they wouldn’t bring charges against the grandmother.

They were right. The law isn’t.

A reasonable, responsible person would know it’s dangerous to put a loaded gun pretty nearly in the lap of a 4-year-old, no matter how frightened she might be for her own safety. But lawmakers have refused, year after year, to pass a law that would allow police to charge adults with a crime if a child uses their unsecured gun to shoot someone.

When legislators have been willing to give such proposals a hearing, opponents argued that the loss of a child, the torment of knowing she is to blame, is punishment enough for the gun owner. But punishment isn’t the main reason we have laws. Punishment is what we must resort to when people violate the law.

The primary goal of any criminal law is to prevent an action. It’s to draw lines in the sand, to specify what society accepts and does not accept. To put people on notice that they must not do certain things, and if they do those things they will be punished.

A law that requires adults to keep their loaded guns out of reach of children would put an exclamation point on the risk, in a way that a general child endangerment law never can. It would force people to make a deliberate decision to break the law — or else obey it.

We shouldn’t need such a law. Adults ought to have enough common sense to know that guns and toddlers — or even 8-year-olds — don’t mix. But clearly they don’t. The incidents are not commonplace, thank goodness, but there’s nothing startling about hearing of a child who shot and killed himself or a friend after he found Mommy’s gun and started playing with it.

A law needn’t burden or endanger responsible adults. Charges shouldn’t be allowed if the child somehow evaded a trigger lock, or managed to find the hidden key to the gun safe. The law shouldn’t apply to people who had no reason to believe a child would be in their home. But for parents and other adults whose homes are open to children, it could spell out very clearly what is expected of them. And that would prevent senseless injury, heartache and even death.