A 4-year-old boy died last weekend at the Malibu, Calif.,
home of rock star Tommy Lee. How any right-thinking parents
could entrust their child to a drug-addled celebrity who
pled no contest to kicking his ex-wife (actress Pamela
Anderson) while she held their newborn baby is beyond me.
But that’s a column for another day.

Daniel Veres drowned in a residential swimming pool
during a birthday gala for Lee’s eldest son. The
circumstances of Daniel’s death are not unique to
Hollywood. They are all too typical and dangerously
overshadowed by anti-gun activists who monopolize
public attention on rare shooting deaths among children
at the expense of more common causes of childhood accidents.

“There’s a big pool party here, and no one was paying
attention for a minute,” Lee told police on a tape of
his emergency 911 call last Saturday afternoon.
According to one report, Daniel’s caretaker left the
boy after bringing him to the party so he could attend
a rock concert. At least a dozen other adults were in
attendance at Lee’s party, including parents, baby
sitters, and several staff members of a preschool.

When Daniel was discovered floating face down in the
shallow end of the pool, a crowd of people rushed
recklessly to resuscitate him. According to Lee’s 911
tape account, Daniel vomited water after he was
retrieved from the pool. Asked by a police operator
if the boy’s chest was rising and falling, Lee responded:
“I don’t know. Everyone is pressing in on him.”

Once again showing what a stellar role model for
children he is, Lee launched into a profanity-laced
panic when the operator warned him to stop people
from pressing on the boy’s chest all at once: “I
know, there’s a bunch of people all doing their
thing, so I don’t know what the to do.”

If just one clear-headed adult at the party had
known how to administer CPR properly, Daniel might
be alive today.

This needless tragedy at Tommy Lee’s serves as a
chilling reminder that the gravest risks to children
are often the least sensational and most mundane.
While school shootings and accidental gun deaths
involving toddlers garner front-page headlines and
nightly news coverage and Million Mom outrage, child
drowning deaths go largely unremarked unless they
happen to occur at a celebrity home. If the gun-control
crowd spent just a fraction of its resources on public
awareness campaigns about the risks of childhood
drowning and the importance of learning CPR, they
could truly make a life-saving difference for America’s
youth.

Drownings are the second-leading cause of unintentional,
injury-related death among children 14 and younger, with
more than 1,000 deaths a year. That’s 10 times the annual
number of accidental shooting deaths for children 14 and
under. (The leading cause of accidental deaths among this
age group is motor vehicle crashes.) More than half of
drownings occur in a pool at the child’s own home, and
one-third occur at homes of friends.

About 50 children in the U.S. drown every year in
5-gallon buckets yes, buckets many of which were less
than half full, according to federal statistics. The
government also notes that 77 percent of young drowning
victims were missing for just five minutes or less.
Most were in the presence of one or both parents.

In the wake of Daniel Veres’ death, some California
officials are calling for new safety mandates. Many
cities require fencing around new pools. In Orange
County, Calif., where eight backyard pool drownings
have already occurred this year, some local politicians
want to require costly pool motion sensors that emit an
alarm. Passing such laws “for the children” may assuage
some guilt, but all the regulations and technology and
wealth in the world won’t change a hard-learned truth
that even Tommy Lee must now understand: