Back

Guns Under Lochowitz and Key

Click to see larger image

Three kids, one shot gun.

You're police. You're dispatched to a shooting. It's hardly routine. It's your son.

"Nick was standing across the room and the other two boys started jerking around with the gun, playing with the gun," explains Shirley Lochowitz. "This always gives me the creeps: Nicholas said, 'He just looked at me and pulled the trigger.'"

As fate would have it, Shirley Lochowitz was also the Caledonia police officer dispatched to the scene.

"The gun went off. The one boy took off upstairs, and Nicholas made a sound. They asked him, 'Are you hit?' Nick said, 'Yeah, I think so.' The other boy, who had shot him, picked the magazine up, put it back into the gun, ran upstairs and tried to put it back under his bed," Lochowitz recounts.

"Nicholas climbed up the basement stairs and that's where I found him when I got there."

As she pulled up in her squad, the neighbor ran past, exclaiming, "It was an accident."

The blast had ripped through Nick's stomach, exiting the seat of his pants. He lived. Four and one half hours of surgery later.

Accidents like these don't have to happen.

That's the message. When guns are stored safely, nobody gets hurt.

Since leaving the Caledonia Police Department seven years ago to care for her son, Shirley Lochowitz has dedicated herself to the advocacy of safe and proper firearms storage, so that accidents like the one that almost cost Nick his life don't play out in other people's lives.

"I stay neutral on gun ownership. I feel that if you want to have a gun, at least keep your guns secure so that these kinds of shooting don't continue happening," she says.

That means keeping your guns locked up where children aren't going to get their hands on them. That means children that do hunt don't have access to their guns without supervision - just to show off, horse around and maybe shoot their friends or themselves.

Simple. Guns aren't toys. They have no business being so handy that they get in the wrong hands.

"Show me that the incidences of someone actually having to use a gun in the home to defend themselves are higher than the number of children killed and injured every single day by a gun in the home," Lochowitz says. "Nobody's been able to show that to me."

Could it be that kids are so used to seeing guns, for whatever reason, that they no longer strike a chord of fear?

It's not enough to respect guns, she says.

"I believe that people need to have a fear of them. If my son would have had a fear, maybe he would have left," she concludes.

At present, statistics are not kept in many states on gun shootings that do not result in death. The damage that results from these shootings goes unnoticed.

Since being shot seven years ago, her son has had to have numerous surgeries. Not exactly out of the woods yet. During this time Shirley Lochowitz shares their story, shares a piece of herself, in the hope of saving lives and growing awareness.

Shirley Lochowitz hosts the web site "The Other End of The Barrel" - at www.otherendofthebarrel.org - providing education on safe gun storage and links to other firearm safety sites. She also makes public appearance on the subject.