The vast majority of American gun owners handle their firearms safely and responsibly. With around 40 percent of the country’s households owning at least one gun, it couldn’t be otherwise. If it were, simple Darwinism would eventually “solve” the problem and leave us exactly where we already are: with a majority of gun owners handling firearms safely and responsibly. That’s the truth about guns. But it doesn’t reduce the face-palm-inducing nature of some of the most egregious examples, such as this one reported by mcall.com . . .

Holly Pallone, a 26-year-old Slatington (Pennsylvania) woman, said she was trying to unload a gun she planned to sell for $200 when the weapon fired, striking and killing her 19-month-old son as he lay in a crib late Saturday night, authorities said.

She called 911 and told dispatchers, “There was a gun and it went off and it hit my son in the forehead,” according to court records.

Admitting she knows nothing about guns, Ms. Pallone told police she was unloading the Smith & Wesson .44 revolver before selling it to her one-time drug dealer. What could possibly go wrong, right?

The gun-grabbing community will no doubt seize upon this tragedy to illustrate why guns are too dangerous for average folk. Firearms should be limited to those best trained to handle them: the police and the military.

But just because some people abuse a right doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. While we sympathize with every victim of an irresponsible gun owner, even the gun owners themselves, we never forget that guns save lives, too. Sometimes, it’s our only solace.

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31 COMMENTS

  1. With a mom like that, the kid would have probably grown up to be a pretty shitty person anyway…

    • Way to stereotype! Lets justify the killing of an innocent child because “he probably” would have been a bad person…

    • Yep, I’m calling B.S.

      I think that whenever an alleged “gun accident” involves someone dying it should either be investigated first as a homicide or suicide.

      This smells like murder to me.

      • If you click through to the news story, the police evidently determined that the bullet went through a mattress before hitting the toddler. Pretty odd way to intentionally off your kid. Maybe felony murder, though, if there was something else going on in the room, which seems entirely possible.

        Either way, that’s a day-ruiner of a story. I agree with the later comments that this is less of an IGOTD than an Unfortunately Fertile Moron Who Happened to Have a Loaded Firearm in the House of the Day.

  4. “There was a gun and it went off and it hit my son ….”

    Where does one buy these self-activated guns that go off without any human touching the trigger, or slipping the hammer, or dropping them on a rock with the hammer cocked, or pulling some other IGOTD idiocy? I have never seen them for sale at gun stores or even the eeeevil gun shows.

    Could it be …. ZOMBIE guns are now lurching through the night, infecting other guns with their undead life? Yeah, that must be it.

  5. Wow truly sad… So really it could be stated like this.
    HEADLINE:
    “Crack Whore Involved in Illegal Gun Trafficking Shoots Child”

    Does that about sum it up?
    Sad though kid was so young..

  6. She was going to sell a smith to a drug dealer for 200 bucks. And she managed to kill a toddler with it. Again I feel compelled to point out that this lady wasn’t a responsible gun owner to begin with. I think we blur the line with a lot of these IGOTD posts. People like her or the idiot that has a criminal record and shoots himself in the Johnson should be in a seperate category from legitimate gun owners having a momentary brain fart.

  7. Yeah, this is pretty much in the “I tripped a fell and landed right in that hooker’s ***” category of likely stories.

  8. I wonder if the gun was legal either? What a woman, selling a gun to your drug dealer, killing your kid. Lock her up and throw away the key.

  9. I don’t want to even imagine what a .44 would do to a toddler at close range. She admits to wanting to sell this gun to a character named “Low” who deals drugs? There has to be some additional charge she can be hit with just for that. She is attempting to unload this gun and of all the possible directions the bullet could go, it hits the poor kid in the forehead? I usually say wait for the facts before jumping to conclusions, but here, I call B.S. also. The criminal underworld should rejoice and be happy that I am not a judge, especially in cases like this one. I’d be sentencing her to the max on every count, to be served consecutively, in the hope she would rot in a windowless unheated jail cell with rats I would bring in myself, for the next 150 years. My wife and I tried so very hard to have children (I have a step daughter) and when I see a brain damaged adult throw away a kid like this, it makes me VERY, VERY angry.

  11. “Firearms should be limited to those best trained to handle them: the police and the military”? So reinstate the draft for people like Holly and those who haven’t yet served and we’re good, right?

  12. “… selling it to her one-time drug dealer.”

    It is tragic, and I mourn for the innocent child. But I can’t help seeing the karmic irony also. Eventually that gun was going to be used to kill someone’s son, and she she didn’t seem to care about that. It’s karma that it accidentally killed her own son.

    • What if that someone’s son was breaking into your and your daughter’s house? My real response would be flagged so I’ll have to leave it at that.

      • No complaint with what you said, except that it doesn’t seem relevant to what I was trying to say. Maybe I didn’t say it very well.

        My point was that she was planning to sell a gun to someone she knew was a criminal, who probably would use it to take an innocent life, or in a criminal-on-criminal shooting. She was selling a murder weapon, not a self-defense weapon, because she had every reason to believe that is the way it would be used.

  14. So so sad. I have a daughter about that age and *always* take the necessary precations to make sure something like that could never happen to her. Just awful.

    • The little one got the express train to Heaven, missing all the corruption, and what could have been good times too. (how many? depends on how mommy dearest paid attention and trained her child.)

  16. I don’t believe one bit of this made up story. The baby died and it deserves a serious investigation. This woman is lying and most likely covering up for the drug dealer boyfriend.

    • First off she USE to do drugs. She was selling the gun for rent money because the (sad, poor) father didn’t want to help financially. She had a hard time getting a job or assistance because off her background. The baby needed food and diapers. She was basically on her own. She held the gun down, and the investigation shows it WAS an accident. She wasn’t trying to by drugs…if she was high they would have reported that. She simply was desperately trying to make ends meet…. And now she has to live everyday with that. Sit in jail, and never see her son again. People are so judgemental…guess they don’t know what desperation feels like.

  17. The ONLY time I’ve ever witnessed a gun “go off” was when my fellow idiot Marine fell off the back of our troop transport. He didn’t let go of this weapon as he fell, and the buttstock slammed into the concrete. A round fired, and I heard another round chambered. He violated safety reg’s in order to accomplish this since a round started in the chamber, but he didn’t pull the trigger.
    All ‘accidental discharges’ violate some safety precaution. If precaution is ignored, then why would they apply caution at any other time? i.e. unload a gun pointed in the general direction of another person, in this article it’s a baby.

  18. Well, she was commiting a crime by selling a firearm to someone she knew couldn’t legally posess one. During the commission of said crime a homicide was commited. If I’m not mistaken, both her and her former drug dealer can be charged with the childs death…?

    Where’s Ralph?

  19. IMHO it sounds suspicious mainly on the account that a revolvers hammer has to be cocked to have a light trigger pull and if it is a double action they usually have heavy triggers. That’s just me but it may have been an accident. But either way what she was doing was wrong

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