The Slatest

Two 11-Year-Olds Shot People to Death in the U.S. Last Weekend

Carrollton, Ohio
The arrow points to Carrollton, Ohio.

Screen shot/Google Maps

On Monday around noon news broke that an 11-year-old boy in Tennessee shot an 8-year-old girl to death last Saturday because she wouldn’t let him see a puppy. Today around noon news broke that an 11-year-old boy in Ohio shot his brother to death by accident last Friday:

The shooting occurred while the boys from Moore, South Carolina, were with a man visiting a friend’s property in rural Lee Township, roughly 50 miles west of Pittsburgh, Carroll County Sheriff Dale Williams said.

The sheriff said the men had three loaded weapons on a picnic table Friday afternoon and were discussing one when the younger boy picked up one of the guns and it fired. The older boy was struck in the head and died at the scene.

The Gun Violence Archive keeps track of all the children 11 and younger killed by guns in the U.S. In September that number was 21.* Twenty-one!

Correction, Oct. 7, 2015: This post originally misstated the Gun Violence Archive’s count of children 11 and younger killed in September as 37; that’s actually the number of total deaths during incidents in which a child was killed. The number of children killed was 21.