Guns Injure Children

By Tim State in News on Mar 23, 2008 6:30PM

In a blow to the argument that hand guns help keep people safe, three children have been injured by stray bullets this weekend. First, there was 1-year-old Dashaun Turner. He was standing behind her sister while she cooked noodles at the stove in their West Pullman home when a stray bullet blew through the cabinet and struck his hand. Dashaun’s mother told the S-T:

"I heard him holler, and, at first, I thought he'd cut his hand. For his first accident to come from him being shot ... that's crazy."

Crazy? That’s fucked up. Dashaun is recovering nicely, but one person in the apartment below, Derrick Franklin, 28, is not. He was killed when a bullet ripped into his apartment, hitting him in the shoulder. His father, also wounded by a bullet, watched him die.

In a separate incident in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, two boys were injured when a loaded handgun hidden in an oven discharged. Parolee Anthony Smith hid the gun that fired. Bullets hit a 4-year-old boy in the leg, and a 12-year-old boy was hit in the forehead by debris caused by the gunshots. The boys were taken to the hospital and are doing okay. Smith has been charged with two counts of endangering the life of a child and one count of unlawful use of a weapon by a felon. [S-T, S-T]