After Sioux Falls tragedy, let’s imagine a world where guns are safely stored • South Dakota Searchlight

Imagine leaving a gun in an unlocked vehicle. Imagine that gun is stolen and ends up shooting a kid. Killing a kid.

It’s more than an exercise in imagining. It happens. It just did in Sioux Falls.

Unsecured guns are dangerous. Unsecured guns can kill.

That was my wife’s main message when she addressed the Rapid City Council at its Aug. 19 meeting, speaking on behalf of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America on the need to promote safe handling and secure storage of firearms.

Without safe gun handling and storage, terrible things can and do happen.

A few hours after my wife made that point to the council here in Rapid City, it was exemplified in the most tragic of ways across the state in the state’s largest city, when a teenager was fatally shot with a 9 mm handgun that had been stolen from an unlocked vehicle the previous week.

Shedding tears as we shed our common sense on guns

Investigators are still unraveling the details of what happened around 2:30 a.m. Central time Aug. 20, when the handgun went off in a Sioux Falls home striking 17-year-old Deontaé Boehrns in the face. He died at a Sioux Falls hospital.

A 33-year-old woman and her 13-year-old son were arrested in the case. The woman faces multiple charges, including accessory to manslaughter. It appears that a group of minors had gathered at the home, and that the 13-year-old was handling the gun when Boehrns was shot.

However the case plays out and whatever the exact details, it’s another example of the horrid potential of guns that aren’t stored securely.

Which is exactly what took my wife, Mary, and several other volunteers for Moms Demand Action, a grassroots-volunteer arm of the national nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, to the Rapid City Council to continue their work to prevent gun violence.

“One proven risk-reduction step to prevent gun violence that adults can take is secure gun storage,” Mary said. “Secure gun storage prevents kids and other unauthorized users from accessing guns. This makes our homes, communities and schools safer.”

My wife spoke of the “gold standard” of secure gun storage: They should be unloaded, locked and stored separately from ammunition.

Such responsible storage saves lives. And it likely would have saved a life in Sioux Falls recently.

The message my wife brought to the council was timed just prior to the start of the new school year.

“School is starting tomorrow in Rapid City,” Mary said. “And we encourage everyone to think about the risks that unsecured guns in homes and vehicles pose to kids and to our community.”

With school starting across the nation, Everytown for Gun Safety and its affiliated organizations promoted Aug. 26-30 as SMART Week. SMART is an acronym encouraging people to SECURE all guns in homes and vehicles, MODEL responsible gun behavior, ASK about unsecured guns in other homes and vehicles, RECOGNIZE the role of guns in suicides and TELL friends and neighbors to be SMART.

According to data from Everytown, up to 500,000 guns are stolen each year in this nation. In 2020, more than half of gun thefts were from vehicles.

Each year, Everytown statistics say, 700 kids die by suicide with a gun. And each year since 2015, from 300 to last year’s high of more than 400 kids under 18 unintentionally shot themselves or someone else.

Everytown tracks those shootings across the nation through media reports. So far this year Everytown has confirmed 168 unintentional shootings by children, 56 of them fatal.

Intentional shootings by teenagers are another potentially deadly part of the unsecured-gun problem, as shown by Wednesday’s tragic shooting at a high school outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

A 14-year-old student was arrested in the case and charged with using an assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers. Eight more students and one teacher were hospitalized. The suspect’s father was also arrested in the case for allowing his son to possess the firearm used in the mass shooting.

In June, U.S. Surgeon Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a health crisis in America. And gun violence is the nation’s No. 1 cause of death for children and teens.

Careless handling and storage of firearms is an important part of that problem. Leaving firearms in an unlocked vehicle is beyond careless. It’s reckless. If a firearm must be left in a vehicle, that vehicle should be locked. But even locked vehicles aren’t the best option for safe gun storage, says Rapid City Police Department spokesman Brendyn Medina.