When I was his age (late 80’s) there were kids in my class who did stupid shit for fun like ripping hood ornaments off of cars or graffiti or petty theft. I looked at them and asked myself (as a 12-year-old), why? I knew the answer at the time: they were 12-year-olds that came from shitty homes and wanted a thrill. They are fucking 12. They don’t fully understand the consequences (and at the time, there were not many consequences).
Nowadays guns are a lot more prevalent. I can imagine some of my hood-ornament-stealing peers doing stupid shit like this if they had access to firearms.
Just look at that kid: fires the one in the chamber and then attempts to re-rack the gun. He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know how to handle that gun. This isn’t much different than a child shooting his little sister when he gets his hands on a gun. The problem is not the kids, it the access to the guns.
A juvenile cannot earn the rights of an adult citizen no matter how good and righteous they are through their words and actions. A kid can be a super-genius who spends his spare time feeding the homeless and working on a cure for psoriasis but until their 18th birthday they cannot enjoy all the rights that come with adulthood.
So what kind of sick mindset decides that a kid who messes up badly enough should get saddled with the responsibility of an adult?
It’s both. You don’t have to be an adult to understand that firing a gun can have devastating consequences. Certainly a 12-year-old should know that, and should bear some responsibility for their actions.
Exactly. And fuck any talk about what is or isn’t a more effective safe. Kids can sometimes figure any safe. Hell, all a doddering elder has to do is write down directions, then leave them some place where a kid or anyone else can find them.
It‘s also possible that he never had much chance for developing the competence of reflecting on his emotions and his needs, and he very well might have had the experience that what he says does not matter anyway or would be held against him. Works with most adults, too.
In such a situation, asking kids why they did something is the most effective way of silencing them. Just try it.
When I was in elementary school some kid took his dad’s gun to school for show-and-tell, he was waving it around on the bus and the driver saw him in the mirror, stopped the bus and confiscated it. It was loaded.
There’s a spate of shootings in the country. It’s a fight that should be brought to everyone’s attention. If BB shows them, maybe it will inform some people who don’t read/watch regular news.
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