One Week in April, Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves - Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

By JACK HEALY, JULIE BOSMAN, ALAN BLINDER and JULIE TURKEWITZ MAY 5, 2016, New York Times

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Excerpt:

In a country with more than 30,000 annual gun deaths, the smallest
fingers on the trigger belong to children ...

Last year, at least 30 people were killed in accidental shootings in which the shooter was 5 or younger, according to Everytown For Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group that tracks these shootings, largely through news reports.

With shootings by preschoolers happening at a pace of about two per
week, some of the victims were the youngsters’ parents or siblings, but in
many cases the children ended up taking their own lives. ...

In 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of
young children and teenagers, according to Everytown’s database. ...

A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely to be 3 years old,
the statistics show.

A 2013 investigation by The New York Times of children killed with
firearms found that accidental shootings ... were being vastly
undercounted by official tabulations, and were occurring about twice as often
as records said. ...