Death Within Reach : Summer Triggers Rise in Accidental Shootings Among Children

Officially, the cause of Christian Wiedepuhl’s death was a .38-caliber bullet in his brain.

It was fired at point-blank range by another 17-year-old boy who was examining his parents’ pistol in an upstairs room of the parents’ Anaheim Hills home on the afternoon of May 24. The slug struck Christian Wiedepuhl above the right eye.

Four years earlier, at the same hour and in the same room, the same boy, then in junior high school, fired a round while examining his parents’ shotgun and killed 13-year-old Jeffrey Bush.

Officially, the cause of Jeffrey Bush’s death was three 12-gauge shotgun pellets in his brain.

Unofficially, however, these two extraordinary deaths may be far more complex. For many believe that the four bits of lead that snuffed out two young lives were not causes, but consequences of living in a society in which between 60 million and 65 million citizens own firearms.

Whom to blame? It depends on whom you talk to.

The Wiedepuhl death is being investigated by police, and the Bush case has been reopened, but for the time being both shootings are considered accidents. So was it the boy’s fault? Or were his parents guilty of improperly storing and securing the weapons? Should they have kept guns in their home at all? Should they have educated their son in proper handling of the guns? Should they have been sold the weapons in the first place?

An average of one child dies this way in the United States each day, says the Washington-based Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. And, according to a study of unintentional shootings conducted by the organization, the deadliest months of the year have arrived.

The study of 532 shootings asserts that such accidents among children 16 and under increase dramatically during the summer and December holiday seasons. It also found that 42% of the shootings occurred in the afternoon and that in two-thirds of the cases the children were unsupervised.

A second study conducted by the center addressed itself specifically to handguns. It found that three of four handguns used in 266 unintentional shootings were owned by parents of the victims or shooters, that 38% of the shootings occurred in the homes of friends and relatives and that 50% occurred in the victims’ own homes.

And Handgun Control Inc., a national lobbying group with offices in San Francisco, asserts that gun accidents are the fourth leading cause of accidental deaths nationwide for children ages 14 and under.

Still, handguns proliferate. According to National Rifle Assn. statistics, there are 65 million handguns owned by between 30 million and 35 million people, 58% of whom have said they own the gun primarily for protection. And 4.6 million people, or 13% of the owners, say they actually have used the weapon for that purpose.

In Orange County alone, 33,571 handguns were purchased last year.

Whatever its intended use, however, it is the handgun that continues to be at the center of the most furious of firearms debates. Its opponents, if they do not argue for an outright ban on the handgun’s sale and ownership, urge that it not be kept in the home. Supporters cite rising crime rates and the protection of the Second Amendment to the Constitution as reasons for keeping a handgun.

And somewhere in the center falls Richard Wiedepuhl, Christian’s father.

“I believe that there’s nothing wrong with keeping a gun, except for an Uzi or something like that,” said Wiedepuhl. “But people need to be trained.”

Wiedepuhl’s profound grief and frustration over his son’s death has not modified that position. Though he says tearfully that nothing can mitigate the sadness his family feels, he continues to believe, vehemently, that it was not the pistol that killed Christian, but a lack of foresight and care on the part of the parents of the boy handling the gun and a lack of basic education on the part of the boy himself.

“A person should have to get a permit for the gun, then go to the (range) and learn how to use it and then purchase the firearm. It’s very dangerous, like a car. You don’t drive a car 180 miles per hour. It’s the same with firearms. You have the right to own them, but you have to understand how to handle them and secure them.”

It is that last comment that is a fairly accurate summation of the party line of the National Rifle Assn., likely the most tenacious defender of the rights of handgun ownership.

“People want the most optimum piece of (home protection) equipment for the money, and a firearm is going to be your best bet for that, more than a knife or some other device,” said Tracey Martin, manager of women’s issues and information for the NRA and a firearms instructor. “It’s a lethal force, but in order to become proficient there’s not the investment of time that’s involved in a martial art, for instance.”

The NRA, said Martin, does not advocate mandatory firearm training for new owners, but recommends such courses for the inexperienced. It is education, she said, that “is the key to avoiding any type of accident. There’s one hard-and-fast rule with the NRA, and that’s that a gun should be stored so that it’s inaccessible to untrained and unauthorized persons.”

That, however, means different things to different people. The single woman living alone who owns a gun for protection may keep a loaded pistol in her nightstand, while parents with young children may keep the gun on a high shelf, loaded or unloaded.

But children, in particular, are resourceful.

“I don’t care how old or young a kid is, if there’s a gun in the house, they’re going to find it,” said Randy Garell, president of the Grant Boys, a firearms retailer in Costa Mesa. “That’s why we recommend that you put a trigger-guard lock on the gun or--and this is the first choice--that the gun go in a lock box.”

There is a lock box on the market, he said, that can be bolted to, say, the floor underneath the bed, or under a nightstand or onto a wall, and that is operated by a five-button combination lock. A loaded gun can be kept secure in the box and can be opened quickly in the dark by feeling the buttons.

But, he said, locks are not an excuse for neglecting education.

“Children,” he said, “should be educated at the earliest possible age how to shoot and how to respect firearms and what the deadly consequences are of their misuse. That’s certainly something that isn’t taught on television. In one scene a guy’s shot and in another he gets right up. They have to know that this is a deadly object and that misuse of it will end their lives.”

Or the lives of others, as many police officers know.

“That’s a real fear we have,” said Lt. Robert Helton, a spokesman for the Santa Ana Police Department, “that a loved one will be out late and will try to come home quietly and they might startle their own spouse in the dark. They see a shadow in the closet in the dark and the next thing you know, kaboom !

“From my perspective, I would say most people (who keep handguns at home) become more of a hindrance than a help. When we get a call from a person in a residence, one of the first questions the dispatcher will ask is if they have a handgun in the house. We won’t go in if someone has a handgun. They do get really pumped up in that situation, and we don’t always come in through the front door.”

It is in just such a situation that the handgun owner’s reason for keeping a loaded weapon in the house must crystallize into deliberate, well-planned action. An intruder at the bedroom door in the middle of the night presents the moment of ultimate truth. Such a situation is the reason the person bought the weapon in the first place, but no one--not police, not firearms advocates, not handgun opponents, and particularly not the person holding the weapon--can predict whether the finger will be able to pull the trigger.

“I don’t know whether anyone can know that,” said Garell. “It’s a terrible choice. It may be well after midnight, you wake up from a sound sleep, the adrenaline is pumping, it may be difficult to see or hear, and you don’t want to spend time trying to remember how to operate the gun. You have to spend time thinking of your options.”

Those options do not include firing at shadows, or even firing at a burglar stealing your television. The law, said Garell, is clear.

“You have to think you or someone else is going to die,” he said. “It’s much the same for a civilian as for a peace officer: You have to be in mortal fear of your life with no other option, no place to hide and no place to run. If a 16-year-old juvenile is boosting your television, you don’t shoot him over property.”

But, he said, if the situation calls for it, you must be prepared to take a life.

“You don’t pick up a gun to threaten,” said Garell, “and you don’t shoot to wound. That’s great in the movies, but once you pick up that gun, you have to make the decision that you’re prepared to use it because if the other person is armed and they see that you have a gun, they’re likely to shoot you.”

In fact, said Lt. Marc Hedgpeth, commander of the crimes against persons bureau of the Anaheim Police Department, “we’re seeing a trend in that quite frequently the mere fact that you carry a firearm is not going to lessen the possibility that you’ll have somebody confront you. It’s not that uncommon for even police officers to attempt to hold a criminal suspect at gunpoint and have the person challenge them to shoot them or even attack them, even though the officer is armed. If you have a gun, you have to be prepared to use it. Once you pull that trigger, you can’t pull the bullet back.”

Which is why, say gun advocates, a handgun in the home should be the final resort.

“A firearm,” said the NRA’s Martin, “is the last line of self-defense, after you’ve exhausted everything else. If at all possible, lock yourself in one room of the house, put as many objects and as much distance between you and the intruder as possible.” But, said Helton and others, there are many people who own handguns who “on a whim purchase a gun, never even fire it, take it home and load it up and salt it away in the nightstand.”

It is these guns, more than any others, that can end up on evidence tables in cases like these:

* A 19-year-old Santa Ana man, Jose Rojas, accidentally shot himself in the head in January, 1989, while brandishing a .357-caliber handgun outside his Santa Ana home. Family members and neighbors told police that Rojas had been drinking and had been firing the gun all day.

* Last August, 9-year-old Melissa Delfrancia was accidentally shot in the neck after she and her sister found a .44-caliber magnum revolver that was apparently left in their Tustin-area home by a workman.

* Gregorio Torrez, 18, of La Habra shot himself in the head while playing Russian roulette with a .38-caliber revolver last September belonging to a friend’s father.

* A Santa Ana woman, Norma Nunez, was killed last October after being shot in the chest by a bullet from her husband’s .38-caliber revolver while he was cleaning the gun.

* In February, 8-year-old Nayeli Diana Placentia was struck by a bullet that flew through the canvas roof of a car of a train on the Disneyland Railroad. She survived.

There are, however, instances in which handguns have been used successfully by private citizens to foil crimes:

* Craig Tantalo of San Juan Capistrano answered his door at about 2 a.m. in February, 1986, and was confronted by two masked and armed men, one of whom shoved a pistol into his face. As he was backing up, Tantalo reached behind him and grabbed a 9-millimeter pistol that he had forgotten to put away the night before, disarmed the man and shot him in the groin. The second man fled.

* In September, 1987, 76-year-old Roy Johnson, a resident of Leisure World in Seal Beach, was awakened by sounds in his apartment and confronted a burglar with a .22-caliber revolver. When the man advanced on him, Johnson fired, wounding the man in the right armpit. The burglar fled on a motorcycle but was captured an hour later.

But there are no guarantees of a happy ending when bullets start to fly, said a spokesperson for a national anti-handgun group.

“I certainly believe people when they say that they would never use a gun on a member of their own family” said Marjolijn Bijlefeld, the associate director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a Washington-based educational, statistical and lobbying group.

“But your intentions and your behavior are not always the same, particularly if there are drugs or alcohol involved,” Bijlefeld said. “If we could somehow verify that you’re buying a gun and you’re always going to be a model citizen, you’re never going to get angry or have the wrong people over or never have kids over, then maybe we could talk. But you can’t verify that.

“You can cite statistics ad infinitum, but people will say, ‘I’ll take my chances and I’ll know what to do, I’d know exactly how to handle the situation.’ They’re like armchair policemen. When you think that of the 50 police officers in 1988 who were killed (in the United States) with handguns, five of them were killed with their own handguns, what does that say about you, who are already probably going to be a little intimidated by the gun?

“If that gun can be taken away and used against someone who is familiar with their own gun, it can certainly happen to you. I say to these people, please be realistic and think about the kind of risk you’re taking.”

According to statistics gathered by the coalition, the chances of using the weapon properly do not appear to be good. There were 140 justifiable homicides committed with handguns in 1988, said Bijlefeld. But there were also slightly more than 9,000 handgun homicides that were not justified, about 12,000 suicides and about 1,000 unintentional shootings that were fatal.

It is that last category that wounds Richard Wiedepuhl most deeply, for it implies, with antiseptic certainty, that his son’s death could have been avoided.

“I can’t bring my son back,” he said. “But I’m going to make sure that people realize that extreme steps must be taken. Education comes first, as soon as possible, and then security. Because we could become a killing society, with more people dying of accidents than diseases.”

“This is a grief which I never will outlive. You always think you’re going to outlive your own children.”

Patrick Mott is a regular contributor to Orange County Life. Times researcher Dallas M.

Jackson contributed to this story.