Neither vigorous gun control laws nor boisterous child safety campaigns would have prevented 9-year-old Tyler Richard from shooting himself in the chest on Tuesday.

Laws and warnings couldn’t have changed the source of his accident: pure, brutal negligence.

“I’m a male I guess, and I do like ’em,” said Richard’s grandfather, Charles Martin, about firearms, after inexplicably leaving his grandson alone at home in Mexico to run errands, with a .38-caliber handgun stuffed within couch cushions. Martin reacted to the boy’s self-inflicted gunshot wound with incredulity.

“It blows my mind where he found it,” Martin said.

It nearly blew away his grandson, as well.

While the boy should have never pulled the trigger, Martin remains wholly culpable for his injuries. Without the intervention of a benevolent passer-by, Thomas Harrison, we could likely be mourning a young life cut short, his silence facilitated by indescribable, indefensible ignorance.

Harrison is the hero of this strange saga, a happenstance wanderer who scooped the injured boy and took him to Rumford Hospital. His selflessness, and bravery deserves thunderous applause.

Anytime a child is accidentally injured or killed by a firearm, the traditional public postmortem focuses on Maine’s weak gun laws (regularly given failing grades by gun-control groups), or the importance of popular initiatives, such as free gun locks, which are distributed regularly by police agencies and safety advocates.

Incidents like Richard’s are so uncommon, however, it makes discussion of strengthening preventative firearm measures difficult. There were only two accidental shooting deaths of people aged younger than 20 in Maine 1999-2004, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control.

This comes although Maine regularly ranks as highest in the Unites States in gun ownership and guns per household. By and large, the rare occurrence of childhood firearm accidents, coupled with the amount of guns per capita, shows that the majority of gun owners in Maine are responsible.

And, most important, that Richard’s accident was easily preventable.

These are no laurels to rest on, though, as the accident also shows the consequences of gun owners acting harebrained with their firearms, even if only fleetingly.

Although Martin’s particular actions are inexcusable – who, in their right mind, leaves a 9-year-old home alone with a handgun in the couch cushions? – he is also guilty of thinking as many could.

Nothing is going happen. I’ll only be gone for a minute. The child will never find the gun anyway.

Thinking like that led to a critically injured boy, screaming for help in a front yard, who is only living to play another day because of sheer luck, in the form of a passing Good Samaritan in a Ford pickup.

It’s enough to chill a parent’s bones.

And enough to remind gun owners that regardless of laws and warnings, protecting children from firearm accidents starts – and ends – with their vigilance at home.