11 year shoots 8 year old dead!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34450841

No thread on this yet?

I try to stay out of the gun control threads, having been active on WF since the beginning, I’ve seen them all, we all know the arguments, we all know everyone’s position and we all know what it will denigrate into.

I noted last week that the most worrying thing about the Oregon shooting was that no-one on the first few pages of the thread seemed genuinely shocked anymore by what is a very tragic incident. American’s it would seem have gotten used to this type of thing, it’s becoming routine which in itself is a shocking indictment of American society.

High School and College kids shooting each other is bad enough, but surely when 11 year olds go and start executing 8 year olds that he had already been bullying, you’ve got to know that there are real problems. The last snippet in the bottom of the article says that 559 children under the age of 11 have been killed in gun violence in the US this year alone. Note the words gun violence, not accidental shootings.

Surely this has to get a reaction from those who take pride in suggesting that the government will have to pry their guns from their cold dead hands? And if not, it brings me to my real question, what does it take before you, the individual, not society think, Christ enough is enough? School shootings every other week? Does it take your own kid to be killed in school/kindergarten? Where is the line that you personally have?

Would be nice if we could keep the judging each other out of the thread and try to stick to the subject question rather than the usual spin/repeat thread we all know all too well and we are all bored with?

Given the ages of the kids and the modern way everything stays permanent I would have to say this probably should be put into some bit of silence due to the reality the shooter is a juvenile. An 11 year old is not someone I would consider with a fully formed sense of responsibility. This is why we do not give them access to firearms because they are not ready to make such decisions. This is why the law gives them special considerations. This may be a sociopathic killer, or it may be a kid who can be taught better than they have been in regards to the value of life. Of course a relatively large punishment should be given to the child to express the degree of their mistake and to show them society punishes people who do this because it is wrong. However, we also need to recognize this is not a fully formed personality yet.

The people who do deserve to be punished are those who erroneously left a gun in a place where an 11 year old could get it. Now barring this 11 year old being a master safe cracker, or somehow getting a hold of this weapon despite reasonable attempts to keep it from him, there is someone who's negligence as a gun owner and possibly a parent allowed an unsupervised 11 year old to run around with a weapon which resulted in the loss of a life, and they should be held guilty for allowing that to happen.

If only the eight-year-old had been carrying.

True. Forty or so years ago it wasn't uncommon to give guns to kids around here when they turned six. It kept the eight year olds in check.

Just another reason not to live in shitty red states. Oh, and in this state the owner of the gun would be facing prison, and rightly so, for failing to secure his firearm with either a trigger lock or in a safe.

So you object to children being able to defend themselves. Noted.

I was probably seven or eight before I was shooting a rifle. Getting shot at is just a normal part of growing up. Seek cover. Return fire if you can. Elude and evade. Heck, my own brother shot me with a pellet gun because I didn't zigzag. Years later he showed up at my door with a .357 model 586 with an 8 inch barrel and two goons carrying semi-autos with instruction to shoot me. He doesn't do that any more, probably because I'd be happy to drop him like a sack of potatoes at petty much any 3-digit number of yards, or with edged weapons, or barehanded.

Talk about puppy love.

This is why I keep insisting the problem is not so much the ownership of guns, but cultural. I feel this is proved by the amount of westernised, and other, countries that have relatively flexible gun laws yet don't have this sort of thing going on.

I've always tried to be fair in my attitude towards this. I appreciate that many Americans feel strongly about the right to carry the guns and, in my view, they should get to keep them, but within reason. So the solution is never going to be a ban on most weapons like, for instance, the UK and Australia. But the damning thing is that there is no dialogue, no questions asked and no to attempt to addresses the causes of gun violence in the US. From a foreigner's perspective we look at it with disbelief.

I'm sorry to say that as an outsider it seems to me that the problem lies with pro-gun Americans. Not because they want to own the guns. Not because they want to excercise their second amendment rights, but because they refuse to discuss the issue. That is personally where my incredulity lies. There are so many questions that arise out of these events and the issue in general, such as:-

- Are the lives of people and children really less important than owning a gun?
- With approximately 50% of Americans in favour of some level of gun control, isn't that a good enough reason to at least have a debate?
- If this keeps happening in American but not other western countries with flexible gun laws, isn't that reason enough to at least have a debate?
- With nearly one gun per citizen of the US on average already in circulation, how can more guns ever be the answer? Or at least doesn't that figure at least hint at another issue for debate?
- Why is the Second Amendment treated like a divine right? It isn't. It's just a law and the clue is in it's very name that laws can be changed.
- Do most pro-gun Americans truly understand the Second Amendment and it's historical context? Is it really now to prevent against modern day governmental tyranny? If it is, you've already lost.
- What purpose will it serve to keep ignoring the problem? There is clearly a problem, so why avoid discussing it?

I just don't see how these questions exist in a supposedly progressive western nation. Hell, I don't think I've seen any pro-gun American be able to give credible answers to the majority of those questions.

Stallion is right that these tragedies are becoming routine. To have even gotten to that stage is cause for disbelief. Christ, when 9/11 happpened all the professional grievers were out in force, arm in arm. Yet we have Americans being gunned down by the thousands every year within their own borders and nonetheless millions of their countrymen don't seem to give a shit. I find that astonishing hypocrisy.

Stallion asks how many more incidents it will take for the pro-gun Americans to come to the table and discuss? Well, with the complete lack of effort to do so thus far, it seems to me that a lot of kids are going to go on dying for a good while yet.

Are you honestly suggesting that a child needs a gun to defend himself? That children should be permanently walking around with a sidearm?

It amuses me that in your little fantasy above about the time people were coming to kill you, the very thing that protection was needed for was to protect against people weilding....guns!

This is clearly a bigger problem than red states vs blue states.

May that little girl rest in peace, even though all she got was 8 years of life. Goddamnit this makes me heartsick. 8 years old, and shot in the chest. I think what I hate most is the tone of the story. It's just "how sad this is," well no shit! It's not just sad, it's a tragedy. This should make people angry, it should make them cry. We've become so cynical and we think we're so clever. My heart goes out to this little 8 year old girl, who just wanted to play with her puppy. Goddammit.

That's wasn't a fantasy, he actually did that. He tortures animals and once blew a puppy in half with a 12-gage just to watch it die as he laughed hysterically. My neighbor, who played mumbly peg to lose and who dearly loved to torture and kill small animals (for instance gouging out their eyes with lit matches), took me aside and said "Something is seriously wrong with your brother." When PETA's version of Jeffery Dahmer thinks your brother has a problem, you have a problem.

I'd lived with his two thugs my freshman summer semester in college. They saw me, saw him, and realized that everything he'd told them over the previous few hours was lunacy from a psychopath who was looking for an opportunity to kill his brother. They didn't even make it past the sidewalk before they looked at him like crazy man, shook their heads, hopped back in their cars, and headed to work.

My brother told me he'd only told them to shoot me in the legs, if possible, to "apprehend" me. I was at my house, on my porch, with no clue. He does that. A couple of years ago we had another dust up and I slept in the yard for a month waiting for him and a few off duty Miami SWAT officers to show up. They would have lost.

I think you're missing the point and, quite aptly in view of my general post above, avoided the question I put to you.

I think you're missing the obvious sarcasm, Chup.

So, single-digit IQ boy - this couldn't happen in a "blue" state?

From who? Gtwat? The guy who is a member of his own little state militia? I think you're giving him too much credit.

Okay, so since other western countries have flexible gun laws but not the violence,, it's a cultural thing. So how would banning guns change our culture exactly?

Well, first of all, your post is somewhat disingenuous as it suggests that everyone who calls for discussion wants to ban guns. I don't think that's the argument that people are making. However the fewer guns there are in circulation then, by default, the less gun crime will happen. Australia is proof of that. The solution doesn't just lie in gun regulation, and I think a lot of anti-gun Americans miss that very crucial point. Regulation is only part of the process, and only then if it is done correctly. In order to change cultural attitudes there must be a sustained dialogue and attempt to educate current and figure generations about just what guns are, when their place is and how they should (or should not) be used. That, unfortunately, takes time, and I think it is probably even more important a task than any regulation. Quite simply the mentality that many Americans have towards guns, and it seems social interaction, just doesn't exist in other parts of the civilised world....and I think the starting point would be to look at other cultures/countries and think about could be learned from them.

I'm not dodging the question, I missed it. I'd had a gun without supervision my brother wouldn't still be a problem. I couldn't defend myself very well except by throwing knives at him or belting him with a golf club. Those weapons were insufficient and I suffered horribly as a consequence. The only thing he fears is death, and I couldn't present a credible threat of that until I was 16 or so, which backed him off. When I was 17 or 18 I sent him to the hospital for telling me to turn the volume down on The Tonight Show.

You DO NOT want to meet him. He will audit you, destroy you, and make you wish you'd never been born. He revels in that. As a young auditor for Ernst and Young he had 200 accountant working for him on the audit of Orange County California's retirement programs. He later was put in charge of auditing the F-22 program. He didn't get there through skill or intelligence, he got there by scaring the living fuck of of everyone.

I think we reached the tipping point long ago. as I've argued in some of the other threads, somebody's right to easy gun access should not be seen as more important than my right to safety, or this girl's right to be alive. We are clearly in a circumstance in which gun ownership is seen by some as more important than the actual lives of other people. There is something disturbingly wrong with that point of view.

Well it is TN we are talking about here. This is a state where one of their counties are spending their money passing some sort of apology to god for gay marriage while they float on the stupid bubble to 40th in education.

OK, I concede the point. Yes we should have some loophole for the Gturner family tree to get guns and ammo and be locked in a room together. I would even contribute some money to that cause. He is so right, if his family had guns there would be less of them polluting our gene pool. That is not a good reason to hand every dimwit a gun, but we could probably work something out to eliminate the possibility of that fucked DNA spreading.

You coming from a family of compunctionless abusers probably explains why the human parts of you are missing.

That fact that owning an inanimate object is a constitutionally-protected right would be the first clue that there's something wrong with the culture.

Every gun owner thinks he or she is responsible, just like every driver thinks he or she is above average behind the wheel. In this case, whoever owned that gun made a horrible assumption about how safely it was secured (I have not read the whole article).

This isn't to blame anyone for owning a gun or driving a car, it's to blame them for being human.

There's a reason we're trying to stamp out bullying, and yet some of the same people who see anti-bullying as weakening the culture are in favor of easy access to guns. So is this a surprise?

I agree, it needs a national solution, that said my city has a violent crime rate that is the lowest of any in the country and I attribute that, in part, to tough state and local gun laws. Try to get a concealed carry here; you had best be able to prove a damn good reason because virtually all are denied. Not having guns every where does help to prevent t problems from escalating.

And Gunforge hugs its guns closer...

GT, minors cannot legally purchase a gun and if they use one the adult who owns the gun must be present, must have the permission of the legal guardian, and is legally responsible should the gun be misused in any way. The gun owner is also legally required to have the firearm secured any time it is not on his person or is not directly next to a person who is using it and if someone else accesses a gun he has failed to secure he is liable.

Liability breeds responsibility while immunity breeds impunity.

Error. Altho the Second Amendment's language refers to the right to keep and bear arms, what it is actually acknowledging/protecting is the right of self defense, both individually and collectively. Without that, no other rights are enforceable.