Home unsafe home

LI QUARRY JEFFERSON, age 8, was one of roughly 1.7 million children 18 and under living in homes with loaded and unlocked firearms. His luck ran out on Sunday night when he suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen. The only comfort from the death of the Dorchester youngster would be an intensification on the part of both law enforcement and residents to rid Boston of illegal firearms and secure licensed weapons out of the reach of little hands.

The earliest reports on the shooting mistakenly cited the death as the handiwork of gang-involved home invaders. Police now believe that Jefferson may have been shot accidentally by another child in the house who somehow got his hands on a weapon. Though the shooting is shocking, the venue may not be. The victim's family is well known to police and social service providers.

Even stable, law-abiding families live in deadly denial about handguns. A Rand Corporation survey published in 2000 found that in only 39 percent of homes with children and firearms are guns kept locked, unloaded, and separate from ammunition. And this finding resulted from the work of trained US Census Bureau survey administrators who were invited into the homes of people with nothing to hide. One can only imagine what researchers would discover in the homes of dysfunctional families whose members engage in gang or other criminal activities.

City officials and corporate philanthropists are not turning their backs on children like Liquarry Jefferson. Boston's 2008 budget includes funds for extended hours in Boston community centers, the hiring of trauma specialists to work with victims of violence, more summer jobs, and a new day camp on Boston Harbor.

But the violence and maladjustment in some families too often seem to outpace the best intentioned city programs. City workers and volunteers, for example, have been reaching out for weeks to families living in subsidized housing, providing them with information about free or reduced-price summer camps. Perhaps now they will need to include warnings on firearm-related deaths among children, whether from accidents, suicides, or homicides.

Jefferson was part of an extended family in Dorchester's Grove Hall neighborhood that a Boston Police Department pilot program had identified for intensive social services in the hope of disrupting criminal and dysfunctional patterns. The program, however, never came to scale. An escalation in shootings forced police to concentrate instead on so-called hot spots where gang violence was destabilizing entire neighborhoods. For children like Liquarry Jefferson, however, the hottest spot of all is often their own home.