What happens if someone shoots someone with your firearm? For adults, owning and safely operating a firearm is a serious responsibility. The liability rises when someone shoots someone with your firearm and it rises exponentially when you introduce children into the picture. If you choose to keep a firearm for home security, your objective should be to create a situation in which the firearm is readily available to you, yet inaccessible or inoperative to others. As a Texas parent who owns a gun or multiple guns, the statue of the law requires that you safely secure your firearms from minors.
Local defense attorney from Sugar Land, TX, Shawn McDonald breaks down gun laws to help Texans understand their rights and responsibility as gun owners. For parents of minors, you can be charged if your child or someone else’s child gains access to a firearm in your home and harms themselves or someone else. Although you might have trained your child in gun safety and instructed them to not access the guns, you still have the ultimate culpability if a firearm is accessed in your home and hurts someone else.
McDonald shares that the statute states that the following conditions could land you in trouble with Texas law:
- The parent has a readily dischargeable firearm.
- The parent fails to secure the firearm.
- The parent knew or should have known a child would gain access.
Safe storage is employing precautions and multiple safeguards to minimize unauthorized access to your guns. You could store guns in locked cabinet, safe, gun vault or storage case. There are also gun locking devices that make a firearm inoperable. Unloading a gun and storing it in a bedside drawer or closet is not considered safe storage.
No matter what safety precautions you take, you must be committed to safe handling and storage rules for firearms. This not only protects you but those around you who could be affected by your negligence.
Video Transcript:
Interviewer: “Well and that brings me to a couple questions about parents with guns. I mean we’re all parents. We all carry guns. We have license to carry guns. And this isn’t about having a license or not. Let’s just assume everybody has a license. But as far as my wife carries guns. We have guns in cars, in purses, by the beds. We carry them in safes. We put them in floor safes or wherever we need to have them. But what is the actual law as far as if I’m having… you know, my kid is having friends over. They’re hanging out. They get into a drawer that has the gun. They shoot themselves or shoot somebody else on accident?”
Shawn McDonald: “So first aspect is the gun needs to be loaded. Meaning there needs to be a magazine with bullets in the magazine. It does not need to have one in the chamber. And then the statute reads that it’s readily… and I’m going to quote it, ‘readily dischargeable firearm.’ So ‘the child gains access to a readily dischargeable firearm. And the adult fails to secure that firearm or left the firearm in a place which the person knew or should have known the child would gain access.’ So if you have a loaded firearm, it better be somewhere that the child can not gain access or you can be charged. Now if the gun is…”
Interviewer: “Meaning a safe. or with a safety lock on it.”
Shawn McDonald: “Absolutely. Or a gun that’s not loaded then you’re ok, but you’re better off having a club then. I don’t know why you would have a gun that’s not loaded.”
Interviewer: “Yeah.”
Shawn McDonald: “So just don’t make your firearms accessible to kids under the age of seventeen and younger. You know, it gets a little tricky when you have a babysitter. If the babysitter is eighteen or older then it seems to give you a defense that you didn’t make the firearm readily accessible. It’s the eighteen year old babysitter that didn’t watch the child close enough. but if it’s a babysitter that is younger than eighteen then it still falls on you.”
Disclaimer
*This blog post, “What happens if someone shoots someone with your firearm?”, is for general information purposes only. Nothing on this site should be taken as legal advice for any individual case or situation. This information is not intended to create, and receipt or viewing does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship.