by Gary Younge
Rikki: I am very sorry to the people who will be living with this angry towards a 12 year old boy. I pray that one day both sides will be seen. Are the people saying bad things willing to have another innocent child’s life taken by suicide because he hears and sees other people with the negativity? This was a tragedy for both sides and I am very sorry for everyone involved.
(Lora joins the fray.)
Lora: I think Rikki and anyone needs to remove them selfs from Tyler Dunn wall . . . and u too don’t know so butt ur nose and ur opinions out of it and I don’t really care what Brandon does with his life now
Theresa: Ma’am I’m not on his wall I’m on Rikkis and the last I checked it was a free country if you don’t like what’s being said then take yourself out of the conversation there are two families suffering in this tragedy and the last thing anyone needs is someone’s bullshit.
Janet: SHE DON’T HAVE TO, SHE’S TYLER’S MOTHER SO YOU CAN SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!!!
And so it went on.
GUNS WERE MORE READILY available and accepted in Brandon’s world than in that of pretty much any of the day’s other victims. In much of rural America, guns are an everyday part of life, for both recreational and practical reasons. “Being a rural community, we have problems with everything from skunks to critters,” explains Sheriff Biniecki. “We even have coyotes that will chase newborn calves. And it’s not uncommon for a farmer to have a firearm handy to dispose of them. They’re always ready for action.”
In Marlette, gun ownership was, if not normal, then certainly not deviant. “My mom has guns in her house,” says Lora after a moment’s reflection. “They’re her husband’s. He don’t hunt too often. So he just has ’em. And Tyler used to go over there. They weren’t visible where you can see ’em. But they’re there.”
With so many guns around, the potential for calamity is ever present. A few weeks earlier, two men in an airboat in Saginaw Bay, an hour from Marlette, said they were shot at by a duck hunter.8 Only five days after Tyler was shot, a sixteen-year-old shot himself in the foot while hunting; the incident took place twenty minutes away, in Snover.9 Six months later, a twelve-year-old was shot in the hand after a fourteen-year-old removed a gun from a gun safe and dropped it.10
Although Sheriff Biniecki treats each gun death as its own discrete tragedy, one nonetheless detects in his voice a weary, if compassionate, familiarity about cases like Tyler’s. He has been in law enforcement in Sanilac County for almost forty years, starting as a deputy and working his way up. He has creases in his shirt so sharp you could cut your finger on them. The star on his shoulder and the model ship in his window give the impression more of a military man than of a rural sheriff.
“Unfortunately, every few years history starts to repeat itself,” he says. “We’ve had other shootings. Not always fatal. But these things do happen. We’ve had other adults, who, while hunting, shoot other adults. It’s still personal. It’s still human error. And you have to take some personal responsibility for what happened. Part of my being sheriff is sometimes I try to comment on things in such a way that maybe it’ll have a lasting effect. It might keep a tragedy like this from ever happening again.”
Biniecki didn’t grow up around guns. He was raised in Detroit and came to the area when he was ten. When his dad won a gun in a raffle, not long after they’d arrived, he gave it to one of his friends. “He wasn’t against them. He just wasn’t ever really exposed to them, so he thought, ‘Why have ’em around?’” Among the first questions one of Biniecki’s friends asked him when he arrived in the area was whether he had a gun. When he was twelve he worked all summer to buy his first gun—a single-barrel shotgun for hunting pheasant.
Immediately following Tyler’s death, Biniecki sounded sympathetic. “It’s just a tragedy,” he told the local press. “We believe it was an accident, unintentional. It’s tragic. Two lives were affected. One boy won’t be with us, and one will have to deal with this for the rest of his life. Everyone needs to remember that every gun is loaded. Even if it’s unloaded, point it in a safe direction, and no one will ever be shot unless it’s intentional. The weapon didn’t go off by itself.”11
The key to preventing accidents like this, he insists during our interview, is education and parental responsibility. “I think that we as community leaders need to make sure that we use the opportunity to further educate parents that if you do have a gun, unload it and put it away. Teach your kids how to make sure it’s unloaded, and put it away. Teach your kids the safety rules. And then over time don’t get lax with it, because sometimes,” he says, “parents get lax, and children are always curious. Put those two things together and bad things can happen. I believe in this day and age with the Internet and everything that’s in these smartphones and all the things that’s connected to it, all the information’s there. You can even take classes online.”
Shortly after the shooting, Biniecki gave the local newspaper a basic course in how gun safety protocols were not followed in this case. Trigger locks and similar devices can disable weapons from firing, he said, and gun owners should keep safety locks on guns and keep them in a locked safe. Either way, they should be in a different place from the ammo box. “They do not have an updated safety feature,” he pointed out. “It’s a ratchet lever-action, when the hammer comes back, it’s cocked and ready to fire.”12
“All of us know human nature,” he told me. “Children are curious. They’re at an age in their life where they’re like a sponge from the time they’re old enough to talk to start thinking and acting for themselves. And if they don’t know and they’re not taught at that young age that that’s a weapon and it’s dangerous, then bad things can happen. We tell ’em the knife is sharp. We tell ’em the stove is hot. We need to tell them at a young age what a firearm is and what can occur with it.”
This makes sense. And it is worth noting that neither Brandon nor Tyler had been to safety classes, though Brittany says she was looking into them for Tyler. And Sheriff Biniecki walks the walk. The weekend before we met, he told me, he’d helped run a youth day for the Wild Turkey Federation, a conservation organization, which provided safety instruction (among other things) for youngsters. His two daughters grew up around his handgun. He occasionally took them to the shooting range and was always insistent that they observe safety protocols.
The trouble, say researchers, is that the emphasis on safety education alone doesn’t really work. Even when children—especially boys—have been taught the risks, the lure of an actual firearm trumps the warnings about its potential danger.
In one study, pairs of boys aged eight to twelve were left alone in an examination room at an Atlanta clinic, where they were observed by researchers through a one-way mirror. Researchers didn’t tell them there was a .38-caliber handgun concealed in a cabinet drawer. But within fifteen minutes, three-quarters of the children found it, two-thirds handled it, and one-third pulled the trigger. Only one, out of almost ninety, told an adult about the gun, and for that he was teased by the others. More than 90 percent of the boys had received some gun safety instruction.13
A 2013 New York Times article on “accidental” shootings cited the case of eleven-year-old Joshua Skorczewski in western Minnesota. The boy was so excited about attending a gun safety class that night that he took an unloaded 20-gauge shotgun from the family gun cabinet, loaded it, and pulled the hammer back. While putting it back in the closet, his finger slipped, and he shot his twelve-year-old sister, Natasha, dead.14
ANY MORAL PANIC ABOUT “accidental” child shootings must be kept in perspective—not because there are so few but because, relative to other accidental deaths, there are greater dangers to children that spark less anxiety. A New York Times investigation in 2013 predicted that because of misclassification, the number of gun-related deaths of children classified as “accidental” is double the official number.15 However, even accepting the Times’ greater number, accidental gun deaths would still rank fifth among fatal injuries for c
hildren, after car crashes, drowning, fire, suffocation, and accidents to pedestrians.
Nonetheless, so long as you have a society with a lot of guns—and America has more guns per capita than any other country in the world16—children will be at risk of being shot. The questions are how much risk, and what, if anything, is being done to minimize it? If one thinks of the various ways in which commonplace items, from car seats to medicine bottle tops, have been childproofed, it’s clear that society’s general desire has been to eliminate as many potential dangers from children as possible, even when the number of those who might be harmed is relatively small. If one child’s death is preventable, then the proper question isn’t “Why should we do this?” but rather “Why shouldn’t we?” It would be strange for that principle to apply to everything but guns.
But the kind of research that might show what works where gun safety is concerned is in short supply. That is no accident. At one time, guns, the primary source of death of black youth and second-leading source for all youth, were considered a public health concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced findings and reports on how to limit gun deaths in the same way that they produce reports on healthy eating and how to prevent sudden infant death syndrome. They found, among other things, that the presence of guns in the home increased the likelihood of death rather than reduced it.17 The National Rifle Association was not pleased with this particular conclusion or the research in general. “Our concern is not with legitimate medical science,” Chris Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, told the New York Times. “Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.”18
So the NRA used their immense lobbying power to effectively put a stop to the government’s finding out how to make people safer around guns. In 1996, Kansas Republican Congressman Jay Dickey, who later described himself as the NRA’s “point person in Congress,” successfully removed $2.6 million—the precise amount spent on gun research the previous year—from the CDC’s budget.19 The law now reads, “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”20
Because legislation already in place prohibited the CDC from lobbying for or against legislation, the ruling was redundant. But it had the effect of keeping both resources and researchers away from that area of study for fear that their findings would prove politically inconvenient and attract the wrath of pro-gun legislators. “We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, told the New York Times in 2011.21
In January 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, President Barack Obama started a second term that became increasingly strident in its advocacy for gun control. One of his executive actions sought to shift the climate of caution by issuing “a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.”
The problem has, however, been ongoing. On November 14, 2013, nine days before Tyler was shot, President Barack Obama nominated Vivek Murthy for surgeon general. But the process most assumed would be routine—Murthy was well-qualified and bore not a whiff of personal scandal—became mired in controversy. Republican legislators focused on his support for an assault weapons ban and on a tweet he’d sent out in 2012, a few months after the shootings by James Holmes in an Aurora, Colorado, cinema that killed twelve and injured seventy others. “Tired of politicians playing politics w/ guns, putting lives at risk b/c they’re scared of NRA. Guns are a health care issue. #DebateHealth,” he tweeted.22 It took more than a year for him to be confirmed by the narrowest of margins, after the NRA rallied its members against a nominee whose “blatant activism on gun control” caught their notice.23
Research that does exist shows that children face substantial risk in the presence of guns. In more than half of American homes where there are both children and firearms, according to a 2000 study, the weapons are in an unlocked place, and in more than 40 percent of homes, guns without a trigger lock are in an unlocked place.24 Almost three-quarters of children under the age of ten who live in homes with guns say they know where the guns are.25 A 2005 study showed that more than 1.69 million children and youth under eighteen live in homes with weapons that are loaded and unlocked.26 According to a Department of Education study, 65 percent of school shootings between 1974 and 2000 were carried out with a gun from the attacker’s home or the home of a relative.27
And the laws, it seems, are effective. One study indicated that in the twelve states where child-access prevention laws were on the books for at least one year, unintentional gun deaths fell by 23 percent.28 Another, from 2005, revealed a link between the presence of such laws and the prevention of youth suicides.29
Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have child-access prevention laws, which range in severity from imposing criminal liability when a minor gains access to a negligently stored weapon to forbidding adults from providing children with firearms.30 Michigan, where Tyler died, is not one of them. But that’s not for want of trying. A bill to create a safe-storage law, which would criminalize those who fail to lock up their firearms so that children can’t get at them, was introduced in every session of the Michigan state legislature for fifteen years. It only made it out of the committee stage once.
The NRA vigorously opposes such laws, in Michigan and elsewhere, for two reasons. First, they argue that the number of children who die in accidental gun deaths is minuscule and decreasing. Second, because forcing gun owners to keep guns under lock and key makes it virtually impossible for them to effectively defend themselves in the home. (I imagine the “Home Defense Concepts” seminar at the NRA convention would have sounded very different if you had to find the key to your gun safe first.) But research shows that people are most likely to be shot not by strangers but by people they know or by themselves. A study in 1998 showed that for every gun in the house that was used for self-defense in a “legally justifiable shooting,” there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven attempted or completed suicides.31 According to Sheriff Biniecki, most of the gun fatalities in Sanilac County are “domestic-related”—a former husband shooting an ex-wife, or “a convicted sex offender who took out his stepdad and uncle. . . . It’s about every three years it seems to rear its ugly head.”
Laws, of course, do not guarantee good outcomes. They only punish bad ones and set the standard for what the socially acceptable behavior should be. “There were a lot of things went into play that set this up for failure,” says Biniecki, referring to Tyler’s death. “The boys were deer hunting before. They’re around [firearms]. Now, one step didn’t take place. Could the father have locked ’em up and the boys have broken into it? Sure. But in this particular incident that’s not what happened. We know the gun was out. We know the boys had access to it, and we know the tragic results. I think a lot of it is our personal responsibility.” And with personal responsibility, he insisted shortly after the shooting, come personal consequences. “We’re going to seek charges,” he told the local paper. “Someone has to answer for it. The kids should not have been home alone.”32
On February 20, 2014, Jerry and Brandon appeared in District Court. Jerry was a three-time felon. According to a circuit court clerk, over the past couple of decades he had been convicted, at different times, of dealing drugs, “manufacturing marijuana and a schedule-four drug,” resisting and obstructing a police officer, “operating a vehicle while impaired,” and “operating a vehicle with an open container.”
Felons in the United States are not allowed to have guns. So Jerry was charged with weapons-firearms possession by a felon, which is itself a felony carrying a maximum of five years in prison. For leaving two boys alone with loaded guns that ended in the death of one of them, he was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor,
a ninety-day misdemeanor. He was released on $2,500 bail.33
Brandon was arraigned in juvenile court and charged with careless discharge of a firearm, causing death, which carries a maximum two-year sentence. On April 10, Brandon pleaded guilty; on May 5, Jerry pleaded no contest, telling the prosecutor he felt bad about the shooting and had told Brandon to plead guilty because “he had made a mistake.”
At a hearing on May 1, Lora told me, Connie wept as Brandon stood in gray sweat pants and a hoodie and the judge placed him in “intense probation” at her home. The next day he was sentenced. There were twenty-nine terms to his probation. He was sent to a junior detention facility for ten days, with a further twenty days “held in abeyance,” to be enforced if he failed to comply with the other twenty-eight restrictions on his liberty. The probation would be reviewed by the court every thirty days, said Sanilac County Prosecutor James Young, who anticipated it would last until Brandon was eighteen or nineteen, or “until such time that he no longer needs services and demonstrates he needs no more probation.”34
According to court documents, the terms for probation included electronic tagging, a seven p.m. to seven a.m. curfew, participation in anger-management classes, counseling, thirty hours of community service, random drug and alcohol testing, paying for Tyler’s cremation services, and a minimum of ten journaling assignments provided by his probation officer.
Point four says he must stay with Connie in Michigan, point seven that he should not leave the state without the prior consent of his probation officer, and point nineteen that he have no contact, direct or indirect, with Tyler’s family. Among them, those three points proved difficult to adhere to. These rural communities are small; the social networks are tight. Though Brandon hasn’t sought contact with Tyler’s family members, they are difficult to avoid. Connie moved less than half an hour’s drive away. Tiffany was on a shift at McDonald’s in Marlette one day when they came through; other family members occasionally see him around.
