Parents -- some of them -- cannot do enough for their children. Eager and over-anxious to induct them sometimes into the world of adulthood. Sometimes children induct themselves through inadvertence on the part of parental guidance, curiosity urging children to explore areas which present as a distinct danger, a presentation whose threat simply does not exist for them as children are unaware, their experience to that date not having existed, to pre-warn them.

Things that are alluring, because they look appealing, and there is no knowledge of the danger inherent in them, like water, fire, speed, and control of mechanical devices whose outcome eludes the untried mind, beckon, and in their beckoning present irresistibly. An insufficiently guarded moment is all it takes. And those moments are there, in abundance, for no one can be super-aware all of the time, it is mentally exhausting and all-encompassing, when other urgencies sometimes seem to take priority.

A mother leaves a room where her two children are playing, and when she returns it is to discover one of them dead. There was no malevolence here, simply an accident. Yet perhaps an accident awaiting opportunity. And there was the opportunity, leaning against a corner wall, beckoning to the five-year-old for whom the special, child-sized rifle was a prized possession.

In Kentucky, the examining coroner stated, it is standard that young children have their own firearms, it is a social tradition handed down from generation to generation. The company that produced two versions of a rifle meant specifically for children, down-sized and appealingly coloured, is said to have sold 60,000 of them. One of those 60,000 was used, not by particular design, but by 'accident' to kill a two-year-old.

The five-year-old will grow and mature and perhaps find fault with a societal quirk that allowed him as a four-year-old to be gifted with a rifle, to accustom him as a boy in Kentucky to the use of firearms. And perhaps he will not question that at all, and be untroubled that his younger sibling died an unfortunate death as an infant, by his hand, as it were.

Since it was an accident.