We used BB Gun’s as kids in our playground wars. We’d put on those ugly plastic shop goggles and go at it. It doesn’t sting too bad if the person was at least ten feet away. We never deliberately shot anyone from close up. This was ten years before paint guns came out.
We did not use pellet guns. Pellet guns can be pumped up and used for bird hunting. They would certainly break a person’s skin and do real harm. We only used kids Daisy bb guns. They only cock once. You can’t pump them up like a pellet gun.
Times have changed. Two kids shot a reporter in the hand with a bb gun from their back yard. It must have been a pretty good distance away. I took hits like that every damn week when I was eleven or twelve. No big deal.
They are charged with assault with a deadly weapon. :eek: Serious jail time for a bb gun? <shakes head> Seems like an assault charge would be more than enough.
Back when I was a kid, they would have told my dad and he would have beat my ass & grounded me for a month. That would have been the end of my bb gun days. Instead we have to make a huge legal case out of this? It’s not like our court system isn’t already bursting at the seams with cases. Our jails are so over crowded that people are released early. No, lets prosecute the hell out of two kids and a bb gun? Ruin their lives? Turn them into felons? Yeah right. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43960047/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
I’ve been hit with a BB from an old-fashioned one-pump Daisy, and, dude, that HURT! It broke the skin (okay, not by much; the BB didn’t actually enter my body, just sort of embedded itself.)
Obviously, there’s the issue of hitting someone in the eye… (Mama always said…) Or hitting a child or a baby or someone very old or someone physically handicapped…
Also, although it’s not necessarily a good argument or a good thing, but the times have changed. Stuff we did when we were kids is not acceptable today. The “law level” has increased. Terrorism has taken the fun out of making prank phone calls. We pay more attention to privacy rights than in past, making “Ding dong ditch” less funny than it was.
The way I see it, an enhanced emphasis on safety, while intrusive, is, ultimately, a “Good Thing” (tm.) When I was a kid, helmets for bicycling was totally unheard of. So were seat belts in automobiles. It just isn’t the same world anymore.
All that said (sorry to be so long-winded) I still sorta agree with ya!
I agree it hurts. Especially in certain areas of the body. Knee, elbow wasn’t fun.
The kids need punishing. Either by the parents (if they can be trusted to do it properly) or some police charge.
But, assualt with a deadly weapon - is baseball bats, steel pipes stuff meant to inflict serious injuries or kill people.
They should be satisfied with an assault charge for a bb gun.
It also could be a strategic thing on the DA’s part. If the kids have clean records, then he would very likely plea bargain it down to a lesser charge, maybe simple assault and battery, or something.
I do agree with you on one thing: I’m glad I’m not raising kids today! The world has changed in ways I don’t know how to deal with. A great many of the social skills I learned are very different today.
(Gabbing with strangers on a BBS discussion board took me a long time to get used to!)
I think I’m also glad I’m not a kid growing up today. The world is scarier, with a lot more pressure. More rules, and harsher rules. The “age of innocence” ends at a younger age. (I’m an old fart, and, in my day, I was 17 before I saw erotica, 22 before I saw porn. Now, kids see porn at an age too young even to comprehend it.)
But, dang, video games are the hottest thing ever! Whoo! I look at them and wonder how long it will be till we have Holodecks!
Sorry, if I stated my opinion a bit strongly. I’d dial it back if I could edit.
Story surprised me because I have some great childhood memories of backyard football, softball, playground wars etc. I was always getting knocked around and bruised up. All the kids I hung out with did the same thing. Worst injury I got was a fly ball in my ribs during a softball game. That knocked the breath out of me and hurt really bad. Needed xrays. <shrug> all part of growing up
We played “Tag” with rubber bbs all the time. It was great fun, and at night we could sit around comparing our welts and arguing about which ones were only mosquito bites.
I think these kids lawyer need only reference the differing laws about purchasing bbs guns vs real guns to make the point. (IANAL)
The first is that your linked article says “Two teenagers were arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon,” but later it says, “Police arrested two boys, ages 16 and 17, for assault with a dangerous weapon” which may be a different charge (I don’t know the law there).
Moreover, this is just what the police arrested the kids on suspicion of, surely? It seems that any formal charge will be decided by the DA at a later date, and might well be something else entirely – common assault, maybe.
My second point is that the big difference between you playing around with your friends, and shooting at some complete stranger, is consent. Just like a boxer, or a footballer, can get away with behaviour towards an opponent during a match that would get them arrested if they were to try it with a random passer-by in the street.
A kid who lived two blocks from me actually did “shoot his eye out.” Or more accurately, his friend did while they were having a BB gun war in the woods behind his house.
This is the thing I was thinking too. We used to have BB wars all the time. Until one of my friends ducked as he was being shot at, took one in the ear and has been deaf in that ear ever since.
Did a story on a young man some time ago who was playing around with some friends w/ a bb pistol. He got shot at the base of the skull, and it penetrated. They decided to take him to the emergency room, but on the way he twisted his neck wrong and he severed his spinal cord.
Died a few years later in hospice.
Even ‘accidentally’ people need to be responsible with them.
When I was growing up, BB guns or any guns (I had a .410 by the time I was 12) were considered tools. We would have been whipped bloody if we misused any of the above. We would have no more considered shooting each other with BBs than we would throw hammers or knives at each other. And we threw a lot of knives, and axes at targets. It frosts me to see BB guns categorized as toys. If you can kill an animal with it, it’s not a toy.
Well of course it’s because parents are totally inept at raising their children nowadays, so they must be raised by the government. Send them to jail, where they will learn important life skills, and how to turn even a plastic spoon into a deadly weapon. That’s quite obviously the best place for them to be. Why, given the chance, I’d go back in time and get myself into jail so I too could benefit from the wonderful learning opportunities present in our jails.
:rolleyes:
This is little more than one asshole attorney trying to make his career by sacrificing the lives of two young boys. Whether the charge was eventually dropped to a lesser one or not does not matter. The fact that assault with a deadly weapon was even considered proves the intention behind the charges. If anything, the parents who were not trusted enough by the arresting officer to properly discipline their own children should be charged, not some dumb teenagers who don’t know dick from dandy.
For crying out loud…I can only imagine what would have happened to me if this particular DA was involved in any of the times I was in trouble as a youngster. BB guns are the least of my offenses. I’d like to say that I grew up into a perfectly normal adult without the help of an over-intrusive legal system…well normal as normal can be
Kids in my neighborhood didn’t have BB wars but they did other stupid things for fun and pretty much stopped doing that kind of stuff around 12 or 13. At that point they were old enough to have joined a football team or the school choir and have babysitting jobs to keep them busy. They were also old enough to be held accountable by their parents and “kids being kids” didn’t fly anymore when you were 13.
These kids were 16 and 17 and shot a stranger with a BB gun. If I shot a stranger with any gun of any kind at 16 or 17 my dad would have hauled me down to the police station himself because he taught me proper gun safety from the time I was old enough to ask questions about his gun cabinet. If I EVER aimed a gun at another person for any reason other than they were trying to kill me I would have been severely punished. If I did it at an age where I was supposed to be responsible enough to drive a car and hold a part time job my parents would have put me in jail and told me not to be so fucking stupid next time if I don’t want to be behind bars.
Actually, I read four separate articles, and watched a KABC report about the incident (here), as well as the original item during which Suter was shot (here). Though, in point of fact, there’s not much more to it than is in the story linked in the OP.
In that last report, you can hear her say “Look at the blood” as they come back to her live after a pre-recorded segment, and while she seems a bit shocked, I’d say she recovered to finish the report with style. So, good for her.
I got shot with what my SO and another witness tell me must have been a BB gun while walking down an alley one night. It hit me just behind the ear, on the bony part. It bled like a sonofabitch, and I was deaf in that ear for a few days. I’m profoundly grateful it didn’t hit an inch to the right, where it would have gone actually into the ear canal, or an inch to the left, where it could have hit the spinal column and caused real problems (from the swelling, if nothing else.)
I didn’t press charges, because we couldn’t be sure which balcony it was shot from, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. The men with me were seriously pissed, both at the shooter and because I didn’t want to call the cops. They were probably right, but at the moment, I was all “flight!” of the “fight or flight” response.
My son has several BB guns (only now they’re called something else, but they’re essentially BB guns, made by Airsoft.) I don’t have a problem with BB guns, but you can bet your ass that if he EVER pointed it at anyone, even a friend who he was messing around with, I’d march him down to the police station myself. They may not be weapons intended to be deadly to humans, but they certainly *can *be deadly to humans, with the right combination of bad luck and stupidity.
