Abstract

The article presents an 8-year-old child’s death during treatment, whose head was injured while playing with his father’s blank cartridge gun, and it aims to draw the attention to how dangerous blank firing guns can be. The father stated that he always kept the blank cartridge gun in the glove compartement of his car so that his children won’t play with it. The father also said that, in the day of the event, his other son called for him and when he went to his vehicle, he saw his son sitting at the driver’s seat, with his head bleeding. When the case was brought to the hospital, his general condition was bad, he was unconscious, and there was a 2.50-cm-wide skin lesion on the left temporal preauricular region. The cranial CT scan showed introcranial bleeding, oedema, fracture on the left zygomatic bone, thrypsis on the left temporal bone, cerebral contusion, and a shift at the midline. The case was treated in the intensive care unit for 15 days at the end of which, exitus happened. The autopsy revealed that the death was because of cranial and facial fractures due to firearm injury, resulting in cerebral hemorrhage and cerebral tissue destruction. The fact that blank cartridge guns can cause lethal injuries, strongly requires more serious legal enforcements for its gaining. There is also a need to modify the gun’s mechanism in order to remove or decrease the gas pressure at the exit of the gun barrel.

Key words: Blank cartridge gun, accidental deaths, autopsy