I don’t think people ought to make too much out of a tragic accident like this. She could just as easily have been carrying around a swimming pool in her handbag and the kid could have pushed her into it.
If your gun fires when you didn’t mean to, the preferred term these days is “negligent discharge”. That doesn’t mean that the term “accidental discharge” is wrong.
*Official Vocabulary tells us to no longer refer to car crashes as accidents, they are now called collisions.
Why can’t we say accident?
Because “accident” implies there’s nobody to blame.*
Don’t be ridiculous. More likely the child would have fallen in and drowned!
in industry, technical and science fields there is often safety training. like this is dumb and hazardous, so don’t do it.
with a degree in chemical engineering and employment in the field she would have known of how things are a hazard and go out of control. much of that whole field is walking on top of a wall and not falling off.
so she was trained to anticipate hazards and to prevent them.
While shooting in the backyard a number of years ago, I had an accidental discharge. Not a negligent discharge - a real, genuine, accidental discharge.
Oh, I was thinking of another type of “accidental discharge”… 
Not me, although I did assume she was white. Maybe it’s because I’m dating again but I meet a lot of white women who pack heat.
“small caliber handgun” also covers small frame .32 or .22 revolvers.
Purses don’t kill people…
There can be accidents with firearms that don’t involve negligence on the part of the gun owner, such as when a person who ought to be aware of what’s going on, steps into the line of fire (every drill sergeant has a story about someone wandering onto the firing range, and most are probably made up to scare trainees into being careful, but it probably has happened once or twice, given the number of times platoons are at firing ranges, and the limitlessness of human stupidity), or someone does something idiotic, like bringing a small child on a hunting trip, and lets him wander away, where he is shot by another hunter who mistakes him for small game, because his idiotic parent didn’t put and orange vest and hat on him (real story I read about once; luckily, the kid survived). The hunter claimed he had been following some small animal, and the kid rustled some brush right where he lost sight of the animal, and so he fired. That sounds to me like a dumb thing to do, but the closest I’ve ever come to hunting is playing Oregon Trail; maybe it’s standard practice.
The epilogue to your story included this line:
The implication is that you did not exercise due diligence prior to the calamitous explosion you described. You even admitted that you were “not thinking” when you tried to quickly clear the initial jam. Although the weapon malfunctioned, an argument could be made that you were in fact negligent and caused a negligent discharge.
(that still was a scary story; glad your eyes weren’t damaged.)
Still negligent. Main rule of hunting (and shooting): Be sure of your target.
Can you imagine the Thanksgiving dinners? But seriously, I feel much more for the toddler than the mother. Imagine knowing you shot your own mother. Kid’s going to need a really, really good therapist.
I’ll meet you there with ice water. PS. That idea caused me to laugh out loud at the Reference Desk.
The lesson I learned from this is to always carry a second gun to shoot the first gun in case the first gun is trying to shoot you.
If only there had been a “good guy with a gun” there to stop this all from happening.
Pacifier Up! Don’t shoot!
kids used to just cry when they were upset.
little ankle biters have escalated.
All right, what about when someone gets shot with a squibb? There is probably negligence somewhere, but it’s not on the part of the shooter or the target.
Also, I still think that an adult who should know better, wandering onto a military firing range during exercises is being stupid enough to deserve pretty much all the blame if he gets shot, and it’s an accident from the perspective of the person who fired the rifle.