Pink
However we argue about guns, this is where it ends.
A tiny casket is wheeled into the room.
There are pictures of Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck over the mantle. Lullabies play softly in the background, the kind meant to soothe a child, not say goodbye to one. The family wears matching shirts with her face on them. Pink was her favorite color.
Her mother is here.
And right now, there isn’t a word in the English language that feels big enough for what she’s carrying.
I was in that room on Thursday.
She was the daughter of a friend.
We say things at times like this. We reach for them out of instinct. Prayers. Comfort. The old lines about angels and better places.
But the raw facts are simpler, and harder.
A child is gone.
—
According to reporting from KFOR, a 2-year-old girl was shot and killed when a gun discharged inside a home. It wasn’t a crime scene in the way people imagine those things. It was a house. A normal place. The kind of place where kids are supposed to be safe.
Now there is a funeral.
Now there is this room.
Now there is a grieving mother.
—
We tend to talk about guns in the language of policy.
Rights. Regulations. Politics. Blame.
We argue it like a courtroom case, each side presenting evidence, each side convinced the other is missing something obvious.
But here’s the part that should make everyone uncomfortable:
There are things we already agree on.
Keep guns out of the hands of children. Store them safely. Enforce the laws that already exist.
None of that is controversial.
None of that requires a philosophical breakthrough.
And yet, here we are.
—
There are things we already understand.
Electricity is a tool. It powers our homes. It runs our lives. It’s essential.
And it can kill you.
So we treat it that way.
We don’t let just anyone walk up to a live wire and figure it out as they go. We require training. Safeguards. Basic responsibility.
Because we respect what it can do.
Firearms are tools, too.
That’s not the argument.
The argument is why we accept a level of carelessness with them that we would never tolerate anywhere else.
—
National data from KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, shows firearms are now one of the leading causes of death for children and teenagers in the United States. The numbers have risen in recent years, not fallen.
That’s not theory.
That’s not politics.
That’s the scoreboard.
And somewhere inside that data is this child. This family. This day.
—
There’s a moment in a service like this when everything slows down.
People stop shifting in their seats. The quiet settles in for real. And you realize that nothing anyone says is going to change what has already happened.
The only question left is what we do with it.
—
I’m not interested in pretending this is simple. It isn’t.
But I am interested in this: If we can’t even do the things we already agree on, then what exactly are we defending?
Because this isn’t about edge cases or ideological extremes.
This is about the baseline.
And we are failing it.
Not quietly. Not accidentally.
We are failing it in ways that bury children.
—
A tiny casket.
Cartoon characters on the wall.
A room full of people trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense.
I sat there on Thursday and watched a family say goodbye to a child who should still be here.
We know how to argue about this.
We’ve gotten very good at it.
But if we can’t even bring ourselves to do the basic, obvious, minimum responsibilities — the things we already agree on — then the arguments don’t mean much.
Because the outcome looks like this.
And it keeps happening.
Sources & Further Reading
Hemenway, David. Private Guns, Public Health. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
Foundational public health analysis of firearm risk, ownership patterns, and policy implications.Hemenway, David. “Risks and Benefits of a Gun in the Home.” American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine 5, no. 6 (2011): 502–511.
Overview of household-level risks associated with firearm presence, including accidental injury.Miller, Matthew, Deborah Azrael, and David Hemenway. “Rates of Household Firearm Ownership and Homicide Across US Regions and States, 1988–1997.” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 12 (2002): 1988–1993.
Widely cited study linking higher rates of firearm ownership with increased homicide risk.Siegel, Michael, and Emily Rothman. “Firearm Ownership and Suicide Rates Among US Men and Women, 1981–2013.” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 7 (2016): 1316–1322.
Research examining the relationship between firearm access and suicide rates over time.Panchal, Nirmita. Child and Adolescent Firearm Deaths: National Trends and Variation by Demographics and States. San Francisco: KFF, 2026.
National data showing firearm deaths among children have risen sharply and remain a leading cause of death.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. WISQARS Fatal Injury Reports. Atlanta: CDC.
Primary federal dataset tracking causes of injury and death, including firearm fatalities.Batzlaff, Sydnee. “‘They’re supposed to bury us’: Father heartbroken after toddler shot, killed when gun discharged.” KFOR, March 23, 2026.
Local reporting that documents the specific Oklahoma City case behind this column.