HOUSTON — Dr. David Wesson points to a spot below his belly button. That’s where the .22-caliber bullet pierced the abdomen of the first pediatric gunshot victim he ever treated.
The Houston Chronicle reports the boy was 1 month old. He was perched on the kitchen table. His father had been cleaning a rifle when it unexpectedly discharged. The bullet ricocheted through the infant’s body.
The surgeon’s finger traces upward across his white coat, zig-zagging like a child’s pencil following the lines of a maze: through the abdomen, into the liver and out the back.
The baby survived, Wesson said, but the Texas Children’s Hospital trauma surgeon still remembers the bullet’s path three decades later — and it still bothers him.
“When you treat somebody for cancer, you really feel that there’s not much anybody could have done to prevent that,” Wesson said. But not so with a child who’s been shot.
“You’re always thinking that, well, that could easily have been prevented,” Wesson, now a grandfather of six, said during an interview in the emergency department’s exam room.
In the last six days of July, three Houston-area children — boys 5, 7 and 11 — accidentally shot themselves in separate incidents, authorities said. Two died. Doctors and gun-safety experts say these events are doubly tragic because they are avoidable.
