Neglect? :dubious: It is considered a kind of neglect. Edit: As in, neglectful parenting.
You seemed to want to get inside the heads of those who made the statutes, and so grasp how they are enforced. I’m trying to explain the reasoning I have heard/seen being a lifelong resident of Kansas. Edit: Again, here if you do not do your duty as a parent and keep dangerous things out of your child’s hands you are considered neglectful. This parent’s child not only injured himself, but committed a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine and/or a year in jail. I’m going to figure that it’s the “year in jail” aspect particularily that is meriting the child being removed from the home while the parent is investigated. Mind you, the child isn’t out for good. Just while they look into things.
When my son was 6, I took him fishing. He was having a great time, when he miscast and snagged a hook into the side of his scalp. I prepared to take him to the ER, but he really wanted to keep fishing.
I explained what was involved in removing the hook. He asked me to do it. Using hemostats, I drove the hook the rest of the way through. Then I cut the barb off with side cutters and removed the hook. I wiped an alcohol pad over the area pre and post. Kid never flinched; it hurt me more than it hurt him.
I learned later that his mom spoke to a physician about what I’d done and found my actions acceptable.:rolleyes:
Of course, there is the chance that CPS believes the child is fibbing about shooting himself in the head. They didn’t say it was a rifle or pistol, just a “bb gun”. What if they think the Dad got the kid to lie, with the idea that a kid wouldn’t be punished as harshly for breaking the law? 
That might be possible. If so, that also explains why they have the kid out of the house while they sort things out. The public may never know.
Edit: Again, they (various Kansas towns) put the anti-bb gun statutes in place because there were too many pets, songbirds, and kids getting injured. My little brother lost a tooth via a ricochet from a pump up bb gun. There is a chance a kid could lose an eye with that kind of play. So, the lawmakers put the statutes in place. And they’ve been in place for some time.
They aren’t required to report only abuse- they are also required to report neglect. Which generally includes a lot of issues , such as not sending a child to school, delays in obtaining appropriate medical care, failing to prevent a child from gaining access to various items dangerous to a child of that age/maturity (medications, power tools , open five gallon buckets with a few inches of liquid in them)
I have broken metacarpals twice. The second time was at a ski area. I went to the ski patrol shack and the paramedic on duty assured me i didn’t have a fracture. I knew better and went to doc when I got back to town. Doc assured me I didn’t have a fracture. No doc, these two metacarpals right here are broken, and I know this because if you go back a couple years in that file you have right there, you will see that you treated me for a broken metacarpal on the other hand, and this hurts in exactly the same way.
Finally convinced doc to shoot an X-ray and damned if I wasn’t exactly right.
So if a paramedic and an MD can both be wrong when a lucid adult is saying “I have broken metacarpals, I know this because I have done it before.”. Then I would say you did OK for a parent.
I don’t see this as a big deal.
12 year olds can be left by themselves. They can go out and explore the neighborhood. They can play with a friend in the backyard. At any of these times the kid could commit a misdeamnor.
The kid could throw a rock through a neighbor’s window, knock over a stop sign, slash a tire, etc etc. There are a million things a kid could do that are illegal, and only a few of them would be due to parental neglect.
Are people supposed to keep their eyes on their 12 year olds 24/7? Never let them explore the world on their own? Did your parents ever allow you out of their sight when you were 12? Do you consider that they neglected you?
The parent did not lock up the bb gun, therby preventing their minor child from accessing it. That’s neglectful parenting.
But you said if he was not supervised enough to commit a misdemeanor, it was neglectful parenting. When my son took the door for a walk this morning, he COULD have committed a misdemeanor. If he had, would it be neglectful because he was unsupervised?
There are several things going on in the incident in the OP. Firstly, a 12 year old boy was able to get his hands on a bb gun. Secondly he was able to get out of the house with it and somehow (according to what has been said) shoot himself in the head with it. Thirdly, the bb was imbedded in his head so deeply a utility knife could not remove it. (And the skin on a skull is pretty thin!) Fourthly, after failing at removing the bb, and having opened the site of the wound with a utility knife, the parent failed to promptly take the child in for medical care, but only did so after 24 hours had passed. I am presuming the parent took the child in after 24 hours had passed because the site was swelling and showed signs of infection.
In the country at eight years old me and all my friends had BB guns. We plinked at cans, birds, rabbits, and G.I. Joes with them and all without supervision once we had shown we could be trusted to obey the rules of safety . It was standard. When we were twelve we had 22 rifles and shotguns. Those we always had to have an adult about to use.
That’s the difference between country and city living though, right?
That’s an open question. Not neglectful, but certainly unhinged.
This is an unjustified leap from the law you posted, which says nothing about any requirement to lock up a BB gun. We don’t even know if the BB gun belonged to the father or the child.
They are required to investigate, not to take a child away. That’s up to their discretion.
And now the squawking about a 12-year-old left “unsupervised”… When I was 12 that was a normal age to be hired TO babysit, not to need babysitting. You can’t just watch your child every second until age 18, then expect them to magically be capable of acting like adults and living independently.
The two are not mutually exclusive: I’d hire a single 12 year old to babysit a pre-schooler for a few hours after school, but I’d never leave two (or more) 12-year olds on their own all day from 8-5. Context really matters.
And it depends on the 12 year old, too. My daughter at 12 could have babysat for a few hours, but I wouldn’t have let my son.
Sometimes 12-year-olds do idiotic things… Like people of all ages! A BB gun is not a deadly weapon. Are we supposed to lock up the steak knives? The lawn mower? According to doreen, the power tools… Basically, after you have a child, you’d better get a huge lockable safe for all your risky possessions, I guess? Maybe live without electricity so as to avoid electrocution, get rid of the cars in case they figure out how to steal them, pad the walls and bolt down the furniture…
Nowhere does it say the child was seriously injured. A utility knife uses very sharp disposable blades. If a blade was new and sterilized, it would not be so different from a scalpel, and medical school is not a magical place where people are annointed with superhuman doctoring skills that no mere mortal could dream of performing. Where the dad went wrong was in going to the hospital at all – he should have tried harder to get it out himself and skipped the subsequent nonsense. The kid was put in foster care, not kept at the hospital, so obviously he was fine.If they wanted to go after the kid for illegally discharging a firearm, that would be different, though I would think his injury was probably enough to teach him a lesson.
Here’s an article on MSNBC.com with some additional information, and a picture of the X-ray. The BB is not in the skull, but next to it.
Apparently you missed the part where I said “dangerous to a child of that age/maturity” . In other words, feel free to leave your plugged-in power tools out around your 12 year old if he’s mature enough for it to be safe- not so much for the three year old.
No, the father’s mistake was first in having a roommate who didn’t even tell him about the BB until the next day , then in deciding the kid needed medical care but he would wait over two days to take him to the hospital. Then the roommate decides to try to dig it out without even telling the father. I can only imagine the looks on the the faces of the hospital staff when they heard this story. The neglect they reported might have been leaving the kid with this roommate, who seems to be as bright as a 12 year old. Trying to get the BB out of your own kid’s head is bad enough. But someone else’s?