A woman and her children became the victims of a drive-by shooting Sunday night in southeast Atlanta’s Browns Mill Park neighborhood, police said.
The family was outside their home on Fairlane Drive around 7 p.m. when the shots were fired from a passing car, the mother told Atlanta police. One of the bullets grazed a 10-month-old boy in his ear, but no one else was injured.
The child was evaluated by Grady Memorial Hospital paramedics at the scene.
The woman said she believed teenagers were responsible for the shooting, according to police, but no suspects were publicly identified.
It is the latest example of gun violence against children in Atlanta, coming on the heels of yet another shooting at a “Sweet 16″ party that killed four people and injured 28 others in Dadeville, Alabama, some 120 miles away.
The shootings Saturday night rocked the city of 3,200 residents and prompted President Joe Biden to call on Congress to “require safe storage of firearms, require background checks for all gun sales, eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability, and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
“What has our nation come to when children cannot attend a birthday party without fear? When parents have to worry every time their kids walk out the door to school, to the movie theater, or to the park?” Biden said in a statement Sunday. “Guns are the leading killer of children in America, and the numbers are rising — not declining. This is outrageous and unacceptable.”
Including accidental deaths, suicides and homicides, a 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found that guns killed 4,357 children between the ages of 1 and 19 in 2020, or roughly 5.6 per 100,000 children. The U.S. is the only country among its peers that has seen a substantial increase in the rate of child firearm deaths in the past two decades, the study found.
In Atlanta, 19 children and teens were among the city’s homicide victims last year. The youngest, Grayson Matthew Fleming-Gray, was killed Jan. 24, 2022, when his mother’s car was struck in a drive-by shooting. He was just 6 months old.
Police have not offered any other details on Sunday’s shooting, which remains under investigation. It was not clear if the family was the intended target, and no information regarding a motive was released.
— The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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