State laws
According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 27 states and the District of Columbia have laws that impose varying levels of criminal liability on gun owners who fail to prevent unauthorized access to firearms by children.
Although Illinois is one of those states, Santiago was charged with child endangerment. Prosecutors will need to prove that Santiago knowingly created a condition that could have resulted in harm to his children, CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson said.
While prosecutors typically do not like to charge parents who have lost a child to gun violence — they have already suffered an unimaginable loss, he said — in this case, Chicago authorities decided “apparently, you have to draw the line.”
“There has to be some deterrent value,” he said.
According to Everytown for Gun Safety — which counts 28 states with child gun access laws — 14 states don’t impose criminal penalties for “mere careless storage.” On the other end of the spectrum, laws in three states — California, Minnesota and Massachusetts — and the District of Columbia hold gun owners accountable, even in cases where a child may be merely likely to gain access to a carelessly stored gun.
In other states, a child’s handling of a gun must cause some harm before laws kick in, the group says.
“Easy access to unsecured firearms is a deciding factor in a majority of unintentional child gun deaths,” the group says on its website. “These tragedies are entirely preventable, but many states have yet to adopt policies that would make it harder for children to access negligently stored firearms.”
But efforts to expand such laws have been met with resistance.
The NRA, for instance, has argued that state reckless endangerment laws are adequate to combat what it says are “all-time low” rates of gun accidents. The group also argues that universal requirements don’t provide enough latitude for gun owners, many of whom may not have children at home, and can prevent people who keep guns for self-defense from using them in a pinch.
The gun rights organization also argues that laws aren’t likely to reform careless gun owners and could lead to civil liberties abuses, such as arbitrary storage requirements and police searches of homes to determine compliance.
Regardless, in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting in Chicago, LaSalle — the grandfather of the dead 3-year-old — encapsulated what many are likely feeling in the wake of this most recent death: “You know how kids are, they get into everything,” LaSalle told WLS. “There is not a safe place where you can put a gun where a kid can’t reach it or find it.”