We Need a New Word

The English language needs a new word. A word that describes an incident that is tragic and terrible, yet is completely predictable and preventable, the inevitable outcome of carelessness, stupidity, hubris and pride.

This word would be used to describe what happened in Idaho when a 29-year-old mother visited a Wal-Mart in Idaho. Her two-year-old pulled her handgun out of her purse and shot her dead.

We need this new word to replace the phrase "tragic accident" that everyone uses in these cases, to wit:

"It appears to be a pretty tragic accident," [sheriff's spokesman Stu] Miller said.

The victim's father-in-law, Terry Rutledge, told The Associated Press that Veronica Rutledge "was a beautiful, young, loving mother."

"She was not the least bit irresponsible," Terry Rutledge said. "She was taken much too soon."

What sheer nonsense. Of course she was irresponsible. She recklessly left a loaded handgun within the reach of a two-year-old, thinking a zipper would stop a child. She might as well have given the kid a burning kerosene lamp to play with, or a pit viper.

The grieving father-in-law is a victim of the foolish guns-everywhere-all-the-time mindset that results in the pointless deaths and shootings of thousands of Americans every year. To these people it's inconceivable that a two-year-old child would be able to master the intricacies of a zipper and a trigger.

But why does a woman wrangling four children at a Wal-Mart in Idaho think she needs to pack a pistol in her purse? Are there gangs of white supremacists roving the countryside? Do grizzly bears hang out in the Wal-Mart parking lot? It's not like she was going to make a drug deal in Leroy Brown's south side of Chicago.

What imminent threat was she defending herself from in Idaho? Practically speaking, if a mugger did sneak up on her in front of the Wal-Mart, did she seriously think that she could fish the gun out of a zipped compartment of a purse -- while holding a two-year-old, herding three other kiddies and being distracted by their incessant babble -- fast enough to deter him?

A tragedy is an avalanche inundating a sleeping hamlet. A tsunami wiping out an entire island. An earthquake devastating a city. Getting shot by a toddler isn't a tragedy, it's idiocy. If the kid had shot another shopper instead of the mother, by all rights she should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment. There's a sort of rough justice that she -- instead of her child or a completely innocent bystander -- died.

Every year hundreds of Americans get shot by a two-year-old, or a five-year-old with his birthday .22, or a nine-year-old with an Uzi, or a dropped pistol in the men's room, or by a gun jostled in purse, or a gun falling out of a waistband.

These aren't tragic accidents: they are the entirely foreseeable and preventable consequences of people who are not competent to carry or use firearms succumbing to paranoia and fear promulgated by the gun industry. These people have been brainwashed into thinking that their lives are in imminent danger unless they have the ability to shoot anyone they don't like the looks of.

It's terribly sad that this young mother died. It's even sadder is that hundreds more men and women and children will be shot next year in almost exactly the same way, and no one is going to do a damned thing about it.

And that's a real tragedy.