A gunshot and a child dies: Should anyone be punished?

Ten weeks before, Pittman was a single mom who worked overnight shifts as a gas station cashier to keep her three kids fed and clothed.

In 2015, a baby sitter in North Carolina was charged with involuntary manslaughter when a 2-year-old she was watching shot herself with a 20-gauge shotgun she found on a table.

Grandparents in Detroit, both 65, faced manslaughter and weapons charges that could have sent them to prison for 17 years after their 5-year-old granddaughter found a loaded pistol under their pillow and shot herself in the neck.

In Illinois, a grandmother pleaded guilty to a minor gun charge and received probation after a 6-year-old boy found a revolver in a bedroom closet and shot himself: "Oh my God, I killed my baby!" she screamed to police at the scene.

In the days after the April 2014 death of Amy Pittman's son, a second-grader with thick black hair he often wore in a mohawk, the decision of whom to blame fell to Cindy Kenney, an assistant district attorney in Durham whose usual mix of cases includes murders and sex assaults against children.

Investigators said that in addition to the shotgun that killed Christian, they found a handgun under a mattress in a bedroom and an assault rifle in the closet.

In a country with almost as many guns as there are people, it's not unusual to find loaded weapons within children's reach.

A social services worker met with her, warned her that it was illegal to leave guns near unsupervised children and offered to buy her a gun safe so she could secure them.

(Kenney said prosecutors did not charge her boyfriend because, unlike Pittman, he did not have a legal duty to keep her kids safe.) Police, prosecutors and the social services office declined to release any records about her son's death.

Parents are suffering, and heaping a criminal prosecution on top of that grief may not do much to teach others to handle their guns more carefully.

Less than three months after the shooting, a grand jury indicted Amy Pittman on charges of involuntary manslaughter and three counts of felony child abuse.

Journalists from the USA TODAY Network and the AP spent months using information from the nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive, news reports and police records to examine all of the 152 accidents from 2014 to 2016 in which children under age 12 either killed themselves or were mistakenly shot and killed by another child.

The review found that about half of those deaths led to a criminal charge, usually against adults who police and prosecutors say should have watched the children more closely or secured their guns more carefully.

Felons were the only exception.

Because it is illegal for anyone who has been convicted of a felony to possess a gun, almost every felon involved in an accidental gun death faced criminal charges.

Even when gun accidents do lead to criminal charges, most parents and guardians still avoid prison.

Pittman was one of 50 people to be convicted of a crime following the accidents the news organizations reviewed, although a few cases are pending.

Prosecutors understandably struggle with the deterrent value with filing charges, said Jennifer Collins, dean of Southern Methodist University Law School, who has studied prosecutions of negligent parents.

Collins studied such cases a decade ago and found that about half ended in prosecutions; much of the time, prosecutors applied what she called a "suffering discount" as they looked for a balance between deterrence, retribution and mercy.

The government's most recent official count of gun deaths, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, identified 77 minors who died in gun accidents in 2015, but the AP and USA TODAY counted 146 for that year, including 96 in which a child either shot themselves or another child

By either measure, gun accidents account for a small share of children's deaths in the U.S. About the same number of children die each year in hot cars and poisoning incidents.

In Detroit, after a series of high-profile shootings, prosecutors have aggressively sought to charge parents and guardians after gun accidents.

The mere presence of an unsecured gun near children is sometimes enough for them to bring criminal charges and the threat of years in prison, assistant county prosecutor Maria Miller said.

The night Amy Pittman's son died, she gave her kids chicken nuggets for dinner and told them to take baths before bed.

[...] at the hospital in the hours after doctors concluded they could not save the boy, Brock asked the police officer interviewing her an obvious question: "Are we going to jail for this?"

The boy climbed in the open driver's side door, found the handgun his father kept in the center console and stood on the seat.

[...] Special Agent Jeremy Burton of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told him, "You are certainly very careful with where you place your firearms," but that they would be temporarily taken away for safety reasons, according to a recording of the conversation.

District Attorney J. Bradley Smith closed the case without filing charges, citing a lack of criminal intent.

"While looking in hindsight, additional measures could have been taken to prevent this tragedy, the lack of those measures does not rise to the level of reckless conduct or criminal negligence," he wrote in a letter to the police.

Both the NRA and gun-control groups have focused instead on education campaigns that encourage parents to safeguard their weapons.