“The worst moment of my life”: Last August, Tiffani Evans saw her 8-year-old son die, hit in the head by a stray bullet fired from the street, while he was playing video games.
At the end of summer in the state of Maryland, the 34-year-old American had come to visit relatives. She was outside when salvos broke out.
“As soon as the shooting stopped, we all ran towards the house and my son was sitting on the table, head down, with a bullet in his head,” she testified to AFP.
“I knew straight away he was gone.”
Peyton was passionate about American football, “a little math genius” but also “the king of TikTok”, recalls Tiffani Evans. He was not the target of the shots, but found himself “in the wrong place, at the wrong time”, she laments.
“It has to stop,” hopes this federal official, calling for measures against the proliferation of illegal weapons.
“No 8-year-old should lose their life because of someone else’s unconscious behavior.”
A simple glance at the local American press is however enough to understand that such a tragedy is far from isolated in a country where firearms abound. And, in the accumulation of photos of victims, the features are often childish.
In the past few weeks alone, an 8-year-old child has been killed on a Chicago street, as has an 18-year-old teenager shot while delivering groceries to her grandmother in New Jersey, and a toddler 11-month-old was seriously injured while riding in a car in New York.
In Atlanta, in the south of the country, a six-month-old baby was killed on January 24. There too, a life cut short by pure fatality: the child just found himself in the center of a shooting.
– More powerful weapons –
But these various facts, less striking than the shootings with many victims of which America is customary, are quickly forgotten by the public. Their number is not officially listed and research on the subject is rare.
Chris Herrmann, an expert from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, nevertheless estimates that stray bullets constitute 1-2% of total firearm deaths.
The frequency of these dramas explains, according to him, a certain passivity of public opinion, which has become jaded. “If it happened in a foreign country, it would make headlines.”
If there are so many victims, it’s because the bullets are going further than we imagine. A pistol projectile can still be lethal after traveling 500 meters, or up to 1 kilometer for a rifle, underlines Peter Squires, professor of criminology at the University of Brighton.
Even walls are not enough to protect against this danger. On Nov. 25, a 25-year-old man died at a table for Thanksgiving dinner after being shot in Pennsylvania by a stray bullet fired by a man on the street.
In mid-January in Atlanta, a British researcher who came to visit his girlfriend died in his bed, hit by a bullet that pierced the wall.
“Wooden partitions and walls, car doors won’t really stop a bullet”, unlike stone, explains Peter Squires.
Buildings today are often “less robust” than in the past, being built with “cheap materials”, he continues.
By contrast, the weapons are “much more powerful than they were 30 years ago,” says Peter Squires. A race for power fueled by the need to seduce consumers who already own several firearms.
– “Not like in the movies” –
Another explanatory element, “the increase in the number of firearms owners”, advances the professor. Pistols end up in the hands of novices, not always trained in safety rules.
“A large number of inexperienced people handling weapons always promises disaster.”
Achieving good aim is “difficult” and requires training, agrees Joan Burbick, author of the book “Gun Show Nation”, on gun culture. “It’s not like in the movies.”
A practice is also called into question: the shots of joy, which consist of shooting in the air to celebrate an event. The problem is that “the bullets fall, and often hit people 1 mile (about 1.6 km) from where they were fired,” says Peter Squires.
On New Year’s Eve in Mississippi, a bullet lodged in an elderly person’s bathroom “and almost hit her as she got out of the tub,” local elected official Brian Grizzell said. on Facebook.
“No one deserves to sit in their own house afraid that a bullet will hit (or kill) them,” he said.
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