Reply #48: Mighty verbose way of saying you and I disagree

[slackmaster]

It is my opinion that anyone who leaves any firearm anywhere that it is foreseeably accessible to any child or adolescent without adult supervision is negligent....

As someone with actual parental experience, I can say it is foreseeable that a teenage boy who has made up his mind to do something stupid will go to great lengths to do so. You know that I keep my guns in a sturdy and expensive safe. But I know that if I go away for a weekend there is a possibility that someone could defeat that safe with tools that I keep in my garage. That is a foreseeable risk that I can cover only by insuring my collection against theft and myself against liability in case that foreseeable break-in results in an injury or death.

...How that negligence is characterized may depend on circumstances.

Circumstances, like exactly how the gun was stored, which we don't know. Whether or not the owner took precautions that a resonable person would consider reasonable may end up getting decided by a jury.