A little kid finds a gun, fires it, and hurts or kills himself or someone else. These cases rarely bubble up to the national level except when someone, like a parent, ends up dead ... But cases like this happen a lot more frequently than you might think. After spending a few hours sifting through news reports, I've found at least 43 instances this year of somebody being shot by a toddler 3 or younger. In 31 of those 43 cases, a toddler found a gun and shot himself or herself.
As noted on the graph, the paper manually located instances in which a toddler (defined by the author as "[three] or younger") killed someone, a task complicated by the lack of centralized records of shootings involving toddlers.
On 29 November 2015, the Huffington Post published a follow-up article titled "Toddlers Involved in More Shootings Than Terrorists in 2015." While it possibly introduced more information (an additional nine toddler-involved shootings occurred by their count, bringing the total from 43 to 52 on that date) Huffington Post introduced the contrast of terrorism to toddlers:
When that article was published on Oct 14th, there had only been 43 toddler shooting incidents. Since then, there have been 9 more, with an average of one toddler involved shooting a week. Yet, in this year's only shooting involving Islamic terrorists in Chattanooga, Tennessee, five people died, with two additional people being injured.
