I have no doubt that Cody Wayne Adams had not a drop of malice or ill-intent in his heart when he went outside to pop off a few rounds of pointless, holiday afternoon gun hobbyism. But that didn’t matter in the slightest to the woman he had killed. Sandra Phelps, a grandmother known to her large family as “Nanny,” was sitting with family members on the front porch of her home several blocks away, when they heard the shots being fired. Phelps had just enough time to comment that “someone got a new gun for Christmas,” according to the police affidavit, before saying “ouch” and collapsing. She had been struck in the chest by one of Adams’ rogue bullets, having likely ricocheted off the ground before it hit her. In a small act of mercy, the bullet missed the small grandchild or great-grandchild that Phelps had been holding at the time. The beloved grandmother was pronounced dead at the scene.
It was the very definition of a freak accident, one that robbed a family of a beloved matriarch on Christmas Day of all times. Reading about the incident, one stops to marvel at not just the obvious irresponsibility and carelessness that led to this outcome, but the seemingly sheer unlikelihood of it happening. A gun enthusiast or advocate would likely call such a shooting a “million to one” occurrence, stressing that it would be almost impossible for someone to intentionally replicate it. But here’s the thing: In a nation where there are 500 million guns floating around in circulation, statistical probability flies out there window. There are just so many guns, and so many triggers, so many bullets in the air, that the death of someone on a daily basis goes from being some deeply improbable act of god into a statistical certainty. It’s not even one person per day, in fact: According to 2023 data (the most recent full year available) from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence, 463 people died via unintentional shootings that year. We live in a country where this doesn’t just happen to “someone every day”–it happens to 1.26 someones, or almost 9 people per week.
This is of course just a drop in the bucket of overall gun deaths in the United States, which for the same year of 2023 stood at 46,728 total deaths, equaling more than 128 every single day. And that’s just the deaths, by the way–another 70,000 people suffer non-fatal gunshot wounds in the U.S. on an annual basis, with roughly 15% of them being accidental. Many of the deaths are suicides, and the increased suicide risk factor of gun ownership or even gun proximity has been long established: A man owning a handgun is eight times more likely to die via self-inflicted gunshot wound. A woman in the same position? Those female gun owners are in incredible 35 times more likely to die after being shot by their own weapon. Ditto adolescents living in a home where a gun exists, who are also at a much higher statistical risk of gun-aided suicide.
But it’s the unintentional deaths, as in the case of Oklahoma’s Christmas Day shooting, that truly stand out to me as the most chaotically, painfully pointless, the most needlessly tragic and indicative of how American gun culture run amok claims innocent lives automatically, just as a byproduct of its existence. What could Sandra Phelps have done any differently, to avoid being shot that day? Not sat out on her porch in the afternoon? Nope; you’re still perfectly likely to be killed by an unintentional rogue bullet while sitting inside your home. Even people at big, outdoor events aren’t safe from unintentional gunfire: In 2023, two women were struck by a bullet while sitting in the bleachers of a White Sox baseball game in Chicago, with the team claiming that the shots had somehow come from outside the stadium, stray bullets falling in like laser-guided munitions to strike home. What are any of us supposed to do, in order to avoid occupying the same point in space as handgun bullet traveling 1,000 feet per second?
In the Oklahoma case specifically, blame must of course fall on the shooter. The 33-year-old Adams was obviously negligent in some of the basic aspects of gun safety, most notably in his failure to realize that even though he was shooting toward the ground, there was apparently nothing to block the trajectory of bullets that might continue to travel after hitting the ground or his target. This is first-day gun safety material, but in a country where it’s stupidly easy to obtain and use a handgun in many states, and those kinds of safety best practices are always going to be ignored by a sizeable percentage of users, this is just the kind of thing that is going to happen when we’re dealing with numbers in the hundreds of millions. Should anyone be shooting a gun in their backyard, in a neighborhood surrounded by other houses? I sure as hell wouldn’t, but guess what–regulated gun ranges are also rife with accidents, suicides and intentional shootings as well. Nor can you simply handwave the problem away by ascribing it to “certain people,” demographic types or politics, as the country’s epidemic of gun violence, intentional or unintentional, doesn’t map neatly onto the political spectrum. The one eternal correlation: Where guns exist in greater quantity, so do shootings. There might not be anything we can do to avoid being the person shot, but we can avoid being the shooter.
In the case of the Oklahoma shooting, I frankly find great sympathy for the man whose life, freedom and personal identity were all likely shattered in an instant, just because he made a foolish decision. According to the police affidavit, when informed that his target practice had resulted in Phelps’ death, Cody Wayne Adams “became visibly upset and began to cry,” which is the most understandable reaction in the world. Imagine the police coming to your door one afternoon and telling you that you had been responsible for the unintentional death of a person–that perhaps on your drive home, you had run someone off the road, or collided with a person without knowing it. How would you feel, having that suddenly thrust upon you? What kind of bargaining would you be going through in your head? If this man had someone been forewarned that by going outside to shoot at a Red Bull can that he would be causing a neighbor’s death, I can only imagine that he would never, ever have proceeded to do it. And yet he did, and if convicted, he’ll face a minimum of four years in prison as a result. It would be both deserved and tragic in equal measure.
Every day, this is the kind of story that 1.26 Americans–not to mention all the bystanders–have the tragedy of experiencing firsthand. Is our gun fetishization really worth it? Will we ever have the strength to give up the weapons that so inevitably lead to random tragedy?
