Originally Posted by shakran

This is fairly simple when you break it down.

1) Trying the kid as an adult is stupid. We have separate juvenile and adult justice systems because we acknowledge that children are not mature enough to reliably act in a reasonable manner. We acknowledge this elsewhere in society by not letting kids drive, vote, drink, or enter into binding contracts. What we say when we try a kid as an adult (the specifics of this case are irrelevant) is "You are a child and therefore you are not mature enough to reliably act in a reasonable manner, unless you did something really bad, in which case, dammit, you knew exactly what you were doing. We are putting forth the, frankly idiotic, argument that children are too immature for rational thought unless what they are thinking about exceeds societal norms. "You can't rationalize the pros and cons of driving unsafely, but you are fully, 100% capable of thinking about every consequence to shooting someone in the head." It's a moronic way of thinking. Either have two separate justice systems as we do now, and keep them separate, or combine them and try everyone as an adult. This picking and choosing because "we're really mad at you for what you did even though it hasn't been proven yet in court that you did it" is vacuously idiotic.

2) It's not the gun's fault that the woman died any more than it is the bomb's fault that people were killed in the explosion. That said, the gun did /enable/ the child to shoot the woman. Pretty simple equation. If the kid can't get hold of a gun, he can't shoot anything. Again, this goes back to point 1. Kids can't drive, but they can have unfettered access to firearms? That's stupid. So the kid and his dad liked shooting things with the shotguns. That's fine. When you're done, take the gun away from the kid and put it up until the next time you go out shooting. There's no reason for a little boy to have a lethal weapon.


I find it interesting, by the way, that, in general, the people that loudly proclaim that it's not the gun's fault and therefore we must not think about taking guns away from people are the same people who supported the invasion of Iraq when we were told it was to find and destroy the weapons of mass destruction. It's not the WMD's fault either, and so by that logic, we should not have tried to confiscate them.

3) I think mixedmedia's point is the best in here. We have a system set up where we routinely commit atrocities against one another and then everyone quickly avoids trying to find out what the real problem is by arguing over some 3rd party object. People are fat because they eat too much and don't exercise, but instead of addressing the fact that we as a nation are a bunch of lazy pigs, we argue over whether or not we should sue McDonalds. People commit acts of violence against each other because for whatever reason they think it's ok and proper to do that, but instead of trying to find out what that reason is, both sides sit around spouting bullcrap about whether or not guns are to blame. As someone else in here pointed out, if there hadn't been a gun the kid would have used a knife. Or a hammer. The fact is that, whether the gun was there or not, and whether the gun should have been there or not, and whether guns should or should not be legal, the fact that the kid had such a disconnect as to think that murdering a woman as she slept was OK still remains. If we want to solve the violence problem we have, we need to get to the root of that disconnect.

After all, if no one ever wanted to kill anyone, then we could have all the guns we wanted, and we'd still never have a murder, right?