The Awful Truth About an Awful Accident

It was the day after the funeral. There’d been a wake, and no one could bear to clean up the yard. There were beer bottles and Coke cans left by a bunch of cousins who’d stayed late. The mother of the dead child had spent the night huddled in her room, deaf to the company, shivering in the dark.

Now Estela Zavalza sat on the edge of her bed. Her eyes were raw; she hadn’t combed her hair. Her daughter called; she padded numbly into the kitchen, a tiny figure in an old gray sweatshirt, hugging herself, adrift in loss.

If you’re a parent, you probably have avoided reading the unbearable news about what happened to Estela Zavalza’s youngest child. On Oct. 10, her husband, Rafael, a truck driver for a waste disposal company in Whittier, took the third-grader hunting with his cousins, and there was a terrible accident. They were out in the Cleveland National Forest. Eight-year-old Adam had his BB gun; his dad had borrowed a cousin’s old Springfield .30-’06.

The father says the safety was engaged and the rifle was slung over his shoulder with the muzzle pointed downward, but the gun was loaded, in case they spotted a deer. When they had to scramble down a slope, the child clinging to his papa’s pant leg, the gun hit a boulder. It discharged and put a bullet in the 8-year-old’s chest.

You see the headlines, you watch the news. You think, how awful. Then the headlines fade. Left behind is the mother in the kitchen, her child’s school pictures stuck to the yellow refrigerator with magnets, the father in his work shirt, wondering how he’ll drag himself through the rest of his days.

“I went because he want to go so much,” the father said in broken English. “His cousins like it, and he want to go with them.” Personally, he said, he didn’t like guns and felt lukewarm about hunting, but since a trip last year that had been cut short by a magical snowfall, the boy had talked of little else.

“I told him to be careful,” the mother almost whispered in Spanish. “To stay with his papa and not get lost.”

Rafael Zavalza looked at the doorway. “I cannot talk about it no more,” he said, his eyes welling. “I have lost a part of my heart.”

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It is the convention of news that it have some narrative, that there be a lesson in tragedy. A child dies and the public settles on a moral--”these things happen”, or, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” or “they should have been more careful.” The news moves on.

And because the news moves on, because we don’t have to look day after day at the blasted lives behind our glib morals, we don’t need to wonder if these awful things really need continue to occur. We don’t need to ask, for example, why we think it’s acceptable for accidents involving firearms to kill a child a day, on average, in this country every year.

In the aftermath of Adam Zavalza’s death, the moral has been this: Hunting accidents are somehow different from other gun accidents, which kill some 1,500 children and adults nationally every year. In California, there are 300,000 licensed hunters; since the state mandated that each take a safety class to get a license, hunting accidents have dropped to about 20 a year.

There are some hard truths in life, the hunters say sternly, and one is that you court disaster when you go clambering up and down hills without bothering to take the bullets out of your gun. This moral--delivered with much rectitude--comes from people who feel more than lukewarm about guns and hunting. And up to a point, they are utterly right.

But here’s another hard truth: It takes two to tango. The gun owner is only half the equation. What about the gun? We can put a man on the moon but our politicians can’t induce the gun industry to manufacture a consumer product that won’t kill your child if it’s accidentally dropped?

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There are laws restricting the use of old, polluting cars; why aren’t there laws restricting the use of decrepit and often dangerous old firearms? There are laws that say your kid can’t sit with you at the bar in a crowded restaurant while you wait for a table. But there is nothing that says hunters with loaded rifles can’t let unarmed little children tag along.

You see the headlines, you watch the news. You think: How can it be that we, reasonable people, have allowed all the give in this issue to come from one side? We know in our hearts that there is something wrong with the gun lobby’s paranoia. So why don’t we demand compromise? Instead, we accept the status quo; we let the headlines fade. The news moves past the shivering mother, the broken father who was only half the equation. Awful, how awful, we say.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.