[imagesource: ABC News / Beach Grove Police Department]

Toddlers and semi-automatic guns should not exist in the same space together, let alone should there be a moment when a four-year-old plays with the weapon like it’s a toy.

But in America, these occurrences are rife.

In the same month that a six-year-old student allegedly shot his teacher with a handgun at a Virginia elementary school, a terrifying video has been doing the rounds, showing a four-year-old boy waving a gun around outside his neighbour’s door.

He was seen pointing the gun at his own face and then the neighbour’s and pulling the trigger like it was all a fun game.

Thankfully, nobody was hurt.

Police later found that there were 15 bullets in the gun’s magazine, and luckily, no round in the chamber. It was apparently just one round short of being fully loaded.

The father of the little boy, Shane Osborne, 45, was charged with neglect after the neighbours reported the incident, per PEOPLE:

“It’s almost incomprehensible what you’re watching,” Beech Grove Deputy Police Chief Robert Mercuri told WTHR Indianapolis. “I saw it the next day and even though I knew the outcome, as I’m watching the video, I was still scared. You find yourself catching your breath. I don’t know how you can’t watch that video, parent or non-parent and not be shocked and disturbed.”

Have a look:

Nicole Summers, the neighbour who lives in the Beech Grove Apartments, found the unclothed preschool-age child at her door, pointing the gun at her son and then herself. She immediately called 911:

“My son, he opened the door and then shut it and backed away and he was like, ‘Uh…baby with a gun. Get out of here, get out of here!’ Then I looked through the peephole. He (the child) was standing in the middle of the hallway and he was just kind of holding it behind his back and I thought…like that’s a real gun.”

She added, “I sell guns for a living, so I know what a gun looks like.”

Osborne told police that he was sleeping during his kids’ ‘playtime’ and said that he did not own a weapon, per BBC:

“I don’t have a gun,” he tells police on the show, where Beech Grove officers are followed on shift. “I have never brought a gun into this house, if there is, it’s my cousin’s.”

He added that he did not realise that his son had been outside in the hallway of the apartments.

Police then found the firearm in his apartment and he was arrested.

Osborne is due to appear in court on Thursday to face child negligence charges.

[source:bbc&people]