Its the law of escalation quite simply, D

If the law abiding citizens have guns, the villians have guns, so the copper's need guns.... how else could you arrest a villian when he has a metal and you have a truncheon? I think you understand this and such arguments are beneath you.

Do you believe that America maintains such a huge stock of nuclear weapons because it plans to decimate every major city in the world?

so the basic tenants of your argument is that if civilians didn't have guns, cops wouldn't need guns, do I have that right?

of course. Ordinary police arent armed in the UK, and the "special" teams that are are hopeless and should not have them (for example they gunned down an innocent Brazilian electrician on the tube a couple of years... and none of the thugs who shot the guy have even been sacked, let alone faced manslaughter or murder charges)

I firmly believe that only the army should be allowed to carry guns, and special army units should deal with crisis situations in civilian life. There is some argument that farmers need shotguns for pest control also - but the police dont need guns if the population is effectively disarmed.

Right... ask the British police how that's worked for them. Criminals still have guns, the people who are supposed to subdue said criminals are at a severe disadvantage. Essentially a criminal with a gun can only be apprehended by being stupid.

The police use superior (hopefully) firepower as a means of enforcing authority with the threat of physical, possibly mortal, violence. I'm thunderstruck that I have to spell this out. Are you actually denying that guns are meant to inflict injury up to and including death?

It was the first lesson I learned in gun safety: never aim a gun unless you intend to destroy what you're aiming at. To say a gun is for anything less than that is to turn it into a child's toy, and to ENCOURAGE the kind of incident that we're talking about here. And I know you're not FOR 11-year-olds committing cold-blooded murder, right?

then you might want to catch up on what the police training and policies about drawing their sidearms are all about. NOWHERE have I ever read that police are allowed to draw their pistol to enforce a law. EVERYWHERE have I always read that a policemans handgun is ONLY to be drawn in order to defend themselves.

so what is it to be? are we being lied to? I think not. You cannot have it both ways. Guns are either designed to kill, or they are built to provide self defense.

Unless of course you'd like to claim that police officers are a superior class of people deserving of a broader range of rights.

I damned well did when i caused trouble at ages much younger than 11, and i'm sure you did to.

Personally i think letting a kid that young have such easy access to a gun is a mite idiotic, but we'll have to see how the case pans out.

Fucked up case all around really:sad:

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is what I like to call political denseness. Our friend dksuddeth is being deliberately obtuse when it furthers his political agenda.

I have a question for you, dk, and I invite you to engage with this question as honestly as possible. HOW precisely does a gun provide self defense? By threatening... WHAT exactly? If I want to defend myself from you, and I aim a gun at you, I'm keeping you from harming me by saying to you, in effect, "Come any closer and I'll...." ... WHAT, exactly? Scratch your back? File your taxes? WHAT?

This is the problem with the gun debate. I don't think either side deals honestly in it. I genuinely don't have a dog in the fight--I just want people to say it like it is. A gun is MEANT to wound, injure, maim, or kill something. I don't have a moral problem with that, it's just the truth. (In fact, I think having a moral problem with that in the abstract is as absurd as saying "a gun is a tool and you blame the gun for the violence".) You can't turn a screw with a gun. You COULD hammer a nail with one, but I don't recommend it. To treat it as a tool at the same level as say a power sander is just absurd.

No RB, what we have here is you attempting to side step your own landmines because you just got trapped by your own words.

I had a whole huge paragraph to continue on this, but it would hijack the thread even further. Suffice it to say, this kid may have known what he was doing but 11 is too young to be tried as an adult.

Not sure how old you are now, but really?

I didn't know the full extent of my actions at 11.. it's been proven over and over again that children just simply cannot comprehend the actions and the consequences that could follow. Thinking "I might get in trouble" simply doesn't cut the standard that an adult would follow. An adult plays through all the scenarios and understands what each one could bring before making an action..well some do.. ;)

an 11 year just lives in the moment.. he understands right from wrong, but doesn't necessarily understand the extent of the wrong or what will happen when that wrong is committed.

I wrote a long diatribe, but upon review wasn't happy it furthered the discussion.

What I can't get my head round is that anyone can argue against the fact that in all cases the death rate correlates with the number of legal firearms out there.

If there are more legal guns per capita in a country, then there are more people killed per capita.

(see data from here: GunCite-Gun Control-International Homicide and Suicide Rates)

Have less guns, have less deaths.

I think it's sad that this happened I think the gun is to blame in regards to her being dead however I don't think the gun is the reason she was killed
the child because thats what he is clearly has/had some serious problems and would have done violence in any case

the question of whether he would have been able to kill her is up for debate, if he had attacked her with a screwdriver it would have been harder for him to kill her and she might have had some chance to fight back, this is all theoretical nevertheless the idea that any child should be given a gun and ammo to be kept in their personal possession is ludicrous, the whole they don't/can't truly understand their actions is you* making that argument for me

personally I think the child should be in prison for life **and that the father should do some jail time as well

I think that the child says taking the car to the movies and gets in an accident is not an accurate portrayal of the idea, I think that the kid takes the car gets drunk and gets in an accident is an accurate portrayal of when the parents should also be locked up

if the child killed the mother with a screwdriver I think the father should not face jail time however because the child had easy access to and used the firearm to kill someone the father should

some of my not entirely on topic beliefs
-the idea of being able to have a gun in the house and completely deny any possible access to a child living in that house is foolishly optimistic
-All people should be required to take parenting classes when in high school
-the American prison system needs a major over haul either in the positive direction of rehabilitation or the "negative" severe punishment one



*not aimed at anybody in particular more at society with its laws regarding culpability

** see Boy A for a good movie experience as well as a glossy example of how you miss things in prison and to lock somebody up during their formative years is a bad idea

This is my last post in this thread, or anything to do with firearms on TFP, or probably anything to do with firearms anywhere else on the internet. I'm contemplating taking a break from TFP in general, actually, although when I've contemplated that before, it's usually only lasted a few hours. So... I'm contemplating it, but I'm probably not going anywhere.

The irony here is, I don't even care. I just want people to have a LITTLE intellectual honesty. And I'm willing to be the guy on the sidelines of the scrum, pointing out where people are cheating. Somehow my wish that people pull their heads out of their talking-points and actually THINK gets me dragged into one side of the debate. I HONESTLY don't care. Have your guns! Or don't! What the hell ever! Just deal honestly in the discussion. That's really all I'm interested in.

Whatever. I'm disgusted with all of us right now. Myself included.

umm.. how would a parent be responsible for this?? Unless the parents gave him the booze, there's no culpability on the parent's part in this example.

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?

He should be tried as an adult.

I had access to unlocked gun and ammo as child and I was taught the consequences of what shooting a person or myself would be.

This boy was taught how to use a gun, and when somebody uses a gun they should immediately understand the obvious consequences of shooting a person or thing with it.

This kid just shot her and left for school. He had no remorse for what he did. He didn't bother to tell anyone. No matter what the motive, there is no excuse for what he did.

Then, I would ask you, are you advocating dissolving the juvenile justice system? You say he had no remorse for it. Is that why he should be tried as an adult? Why? If an adult says he's sorry for his crime, can he be tried as a juvenile? ;)

Are you also for lowering the drinking, driving, voting, and consenting to sex age limits? Not to pick on you, but just to understand if you think those issues are different and why.

No, it is far more simple than that.

The more guns there are in society, the more violent deaths there are.

No I think it far more complex than that. As our friend Roger Moore pointed out in Bowling For Columbine, Canadians own just as many guns (if not more) per capita than we do yet their rate of gun death is much, much lower. I don't like guns, I don't own guns, I'd be perfectly happy in a gunless world. But it's not the guns.

Omigod, stop seducing me.

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Roger Moore was James Bond. Michael Moore is the obese, fur-faced docu-dork. Just pointing it out because I often hate his guts.

Bowling for Columbine isn't exactly a pro-gun or scholarly source, though. It's got more lean than the tower at Pisa.

There seems to be a disconnect between why we try adults as criminals and why we try children differently.

We don't try children as criminals because it is more productive to instead treat them as children in need of guidance, assistance, direction, and simply help. A child is not yet fully developed. Lawmakers and politicians have recognized this and have put juvenile systems and laws in place for that reason.

We have men's prisons and women's prisons. I think it should be obvious why we don't have children's prisons. Or are we suggesting we put prepubescents in adult prisons?

FYI, we do have prisons for children. They are called juvenile detention centers.

Point taken, but they're not quite the same thing.

Because children aren't the same as adults.

Kids. "Age of Reason." Deep ethical stuff.

lol, Roger Moore...sorry about that. good thing willravel isn't around.

and I don't mean to use Bowling for Columbine as a pro-gun source and I am not a pro-gun person. I only meant to use the statistics that he purported in the film...if they are incorrect then so be it

an 11 year old being tried as an adult is lunacy.

Ok, maybe i didn't know the consiquences of all my actions, but the big ones i did. Granted he probably won't understand the finer points of tax law, but it is pretty obvious that when you shoot someone, they die. As a younger kid i thought that was what always happened, you could shoot someone in the foot and immediatly they would keel over and die (damn the movies). If the kid went hunting he should know shooting things causes death, shooting things in the head especially.

His motives and reasoning may be somewhat screwed up, but to say he didn't know what would happen when he shot someone is naive. The fact he chose a gun over a rusty spork supports that.

As i said before, it's a messed up case, so i'll be happy to wait for a psychiatric report before fully committing either way.

Eh, I refuse to believe that an 11 year old can be held to the same legal standards as an adult. "Age of Reason" used to mean something. I'm not a legal expert but my inner pretend-genius-spider-sense is tingling and it detects some real icky poo.

I'm pro-abortion, babies-on-spikes and all, but that doesn't mean putting wee young'ns in jail for the rest of their lives. I, too, will be awaiting the "check-up-from-the-neck-up" on this trigger happy juvenile dumbass.

...

Reminds me of that Misfits song... "Violent World."