BLOOMINGTON, IL, 12/30/1912: Police are investigating an accidental shooting that killed a teenage girl. According to early reports a group of teens at a party had watched one of them, recently returned from military school, demonstrate the manual of arms with a rifle in the home. After he had finished, a 12-year-old present attempted to perform the drill himself, thinking the weapon was unloaded. However, a round remained in the chamber, and it discharged, striking the girl in the forehead.
You might not guess who this boy grew up to be ...
... Future governor of Illinois and two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson.
Justin Peters recounts the story at Slate:
Stevenson had none of the pathological self-assurance that infects so many other politicians. He was keenly aware of his own flaws and limitations, and openly admitted those limitations in disarming fashion. He was a good writer and a modest man, and he lived in Libertyville, Ill., a 12-minute drive from where I grew up. I like him a lot.
But, until yesterday, I wasn’t aware that Stevenson had a terrible tragedy in his past, something that likely played a part in making him the man he grew up to become.
The version of the accident above, which killed Ruth Merwin, a friend of the Stevenson family, is the official conclusion. Since
Stevenson's grandfather had served as Grover Cleveland's vice president,
The New York Times ran
a story. Out of a combination of grief, guilt and embarrassment, the young man went to his room almost immediately after the accident and did not come out for several days, not even for the official inquest into the incident that held him blameless. He
rarely spoke about it during his lifetime, and died with his biographers generally accepting the official verdict.
But, according to Peters, after his death one person who had been at the party and insisted on remaining anonymous told another biographer, John Bartlow Martin, what he said really happened that night. According to this witness, the young Adlai never attempted to do the drill himself. He just picked up the gun, playfully pointed it at Ruth, and pulled the trigger. As Peters puts it:
This, honestly, sounds more believable than the other story, and more in line with what we know about how unintentional child shooting deaths generally happen. Guns do not often discharge on their own, even old and rusty guns. But it’s entirely plausible that a 12-year-old boy, equally intrigued by guns and girls, might pick up a gun and point it at a girl, hoping to throw a scare into her. It’s just as plausible that, hoping to avoid further tragedy, the family might close ranks and insist that the gun accidentally discharged.
I accept this as the more likely version of events as well, given the many similar stories we read each week in the GunFAIL diaries.
However, I'm not as willing as Peters to let Adlai, or even the Stevenson family, off the hook here. Just because this happened a little over a century ago, before Jeff Cooper was even born, does not make it any less of a lapse of good judgement for someone in the Stevenson home to have left even an old rusty rifle where anyone could pick it up; or for someone, even someone trained in it, to do the manual at arms in a fairly crowded room full of teenagers. Much less for a young boy to pick up that weapon and not realize that when you have your finger on the trigger of a gun and pull it, whatever happens afterward is not an accident.
To be fair, Adlai's father very soon banned all guns from the house, and Adlai himself refused to have any in his own home (although he was not so gun-averse as not to serve in the Navy a few years later). And as important as Adlai Stevenson is in American political history (he may well be the last person to lose the presidential race and yet be renominated by his party four years later, for some time longer than the lifespan of the youngest people reading this), and the history of the Democratic Party in particular, I still will call his action as a 12-year-old irresponsible. Even for the cover-story version, he should have faced some accountability.
When you have your finger on the trigger of a gun and pull it, whatever happens afterward is not an accident.
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