Charges have been filed against two people in separate shootings involving 2-year-old children in Chicago within hours of each other. CBS Chicago’s Megan Hickey reports.
In one case over the weekend, a 2-year-old girl grabbed a loaded gun and shot herself. Rogers Park.
Hickey said it’s unclear whether either of the two people charged actually fired a weapon. But both were charged with child endangerment for having a loaded weapon without insurance.
Chicago police say they received a call just after 6pm Sunday from Rogers Park.
They say a little girl found the loaded gun and shot herself. Audio from the office said a woman called police and said her daughter reached for her purse, which contained a firearm.
The 2-year-old girl was injured in the hand and was listed in good condition at a hospital in Evanston, Illinois.
Neighbors didn’t have much information Monday, other than to say they heard the gunshot.
Chicago police said Monday that a 22-year-old woman was charged with two misdemeanors in the Rogers Park incident: one count of child endangerment and one count of having a handgun without a valid identification card. valid firearms owners.
Meanwhile, 22 miles away and three and a half hours later, police said another 2-year-old boy was shot.
Police said around 10:30 p.m., a 2-year-old boy was playing in a bedroom when a gun went off.
He was also hit in the hand and was taken to a hospital in fair condition.
Police did not say who fired the gun in that case. But a 24-year-old man was charged with child endangerment and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
“Two 2-year-olds,” community activist Andrew Holmes lamented Sunday night. “Get a lock. Lock those guns. Search those houses, because these two kids could be permanently damaged.”
Why do young children in Chicago have access to loaded guns? And what is being done about it?
A 2021 study by Lurie Children’s Hospital found that 22 percent of parents in the city reported having a firearm at home, and nearly half of Chicago parents keep them loaded.
Meanwhile, two different laws went into effect in January.
One of them requires the state to develop a public awareness campaign about how to store a gun safely. Local jurisdictions have taken it upon themselves to host demonstrations on how to do this.
The second law requires safe gun storage to be added to safety education lessons taught in Illinois schools. But this law would only provide instruction for school-aged children and would not have prevented such cases of young children.
CBS Chicago reached out to the Illinois Department of Public Health for an update on the public awareness campaign, five months after the law went into effect.
By late Monday, the station had still not received a response.
