Video from a security camera inside of the Family Pawn Shop in Hurricane, Utah, has been making the rounds for cringe-inducing reasons. The video shows two women looking at a rifle that’s resting on a glass case. They admire that rifle, as a shop person ostensibly tries to sell them the firearm. There is nothing particularly interesting about watching someone fetishize a gun. However, sitting next to the women on the glass case, with their back to the gun enthusiasts, is an infant, semi-swaddled in a camouflage blanket (or possibly jacket).
The glass case is reportedly rises 3.5 feet off the concrete flooring of the shop. The baby is sitting up in that wobbly way that infants who are newly upright sit. The three people continue to stare at the gun and flip it about while the infant slowly begins to fall over and off of the case. Luckily, the manager walking the floor of the pawn shop is actually paying attention to the only thing worth anything in the store, and is able to heroically run over and catch the child before the infant hits the floor—head first.
The manager, Bill Reel, told CBS 17 that he “just saw the baby look unsteady and I just booked it that way.” He said he was happy that the child didn’t get hurt, but the whole experience stressed him out. “I was scared to death. My heart was racing. I was pretty shaken up. I held the baby for a couple of seconds, and then gave it back to I believe, grandma.”
Being a parent is tough. Having a small child is incredibly tough, and frequently the tragic and truly awful stories one reads about parents forgetting their infant children in hot cars and the like can be very directly attributed to the profound levels of sleep deprivation that parents, and especially working parents, deal with in the modern era. But what is happening here is not that.
The first thing to know is that this is a baby—an infant, and not a toddler. That child cannot toddle yet, they are far too little. And having had two infants in my life and under my care, I can tell you accidents happen. You put your infant on the couch and turn to grab something in the kitchen and you come back and your baby was able to get themselves to the end of the couch and fall off? That can happen a lot easier than you’d think. Lesson learned.
You put your baby on a glass case more than a yard off the floor in a store and then forget about your baby as you admire a gun you are thinking of getting someone for Christmas? That cannot happen. That’s a dumb and dangerous thing to happen. If you put your infant on the edge of your dining room table and then decided to inspect your rifle with your back to your baby, you would be considered an idiot. You sit your infant on the edge of the hood of your car and then check the scope of your gun by pointing it at your chimney? You are being an unsafe asshole.
For all of the talk about guns and hunting and families with long traditions of those things, the fact of the matter is that far too many “responsible” gun owners suck at being safe around guns. Study after study and statistics on accidental gun deaths and children show that even those Americans who believe themselves to be smart and responsible about guns are frequently full of shit because nothing bad has yet to happen to them. If you want to have a society where you are allowed to have guns, then you need to act like those guns are as serious as they are.
The two women in that store made a terrible mistake and were lucky that Bill Heel was watching their charge when they were being neglectful. Stories like this one will be pointed to as shaming the ladies in the video and being intolerant of gun culture in general, and there is something true in that. But this is a moment of shame and luckily just embarrassment for those two women, who could have been spending the next 24 hours beating themselves up in an emergency room.
Warning: The video is distressing.
And CBS 17’s news story below.