I hate guns. I really do. Even though I understand that guns don't kill people, people do, I still don't want anything to do with them. Now, the accidental death of Michael Bayless at the hands of his 3-year-old son make me hate them even more. According to police, Bayless' son found the loaded handgun in his southern Indiana home and it accidentally discharged killing his dad while the man, his wife and their other three children watched television.
Amazingly, no one else was hurt, but now a family is fatherless and a child will have to live with a tragedy he's way too young to understand.
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Although police think this is nothing more than a tragic accident, they continue the investigation as to why the .45 caliber handgun was within the reach of a child. And that, in the end, is the biggest issue I have with guns.
Apparently, Bayless had been warned about keeping his gun in a safe place away from his kids. A friend of his, Charlene Taylor, told WLKY-TV, that Bayless had the gun with him at all times and that it wa always unloaded. But not this time. "It does not make any sense to me at all that it would have been loaded."
As the mother of an almost 3-year-old son, I can't even begin to imagine the horror of such a tragedy. For years now, I've been trying to convince my own husband to get rid of the gun he's owned since before we even met. Although he keeps it in a safe far away from the reach of our children–in fact, they don't even know it's there–I still would feel so much safer if we simply didn't have it. But my husband claims the opposite: he feels safer with it.
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I plan on telling him about Bayless' tragic death in the hopes that I'll convince him to get rid of his gun.
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Do you own a gun? How do you make sure it's out of the reach of your children? Share your thoughts with us by leaving us a comment below.
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