Cite? And no gun problem is different than "people who support all the death " or “deny the very existence of some victims of gun violence.”
Around 20K people are murdered every year in America, about 10K to 15K by guns. That is a problem.
But few think that problem is worth repealing the 2nd Ad to fix.
Can we PLEASE get back to the OP? We do not need another general gun control debate.
I will not respond to any more general gun control nonsense posts. On topic only please.
Distinction without difference. The end result is the same: “let’s do nothing while children die”.
Bun control is a very important issue. Buns with sesame are entirely unregulated and this is morally wrong.
I will not respond to any more general gun control posts. On topic only please.
Well…SOME of the people who die from gun violence didn’t choose to be involved in gun violence. When you start to parse it out to this level (i.e. innocent people killed by guns per year) you are talking about a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand…and you could find similar numbers in a lot of things that people didn’t choose but killed them anyway. Sort of like some folks killed by drunk drivers, or drivers texting, or whatever, didn’t choose to have some idiot do something stupid and get them killed. Tobacco also springs to mind…IIRC, we are talking about something like 5-6K die from second hand smoke, presumably by those who didn’t choose to die from someone else smoking. You could say this about a lot of things that kill people in large numbers. A lot of folks don’t choose to get cancer due to bad stuff in the water or their food or whatever. Many don’t choose to die from air pollution, though I suppose they tacitly choose it because they use power.
This whole choice thing is a red herring, though, at least IMHO, since we live in a democracy, and all those things that kill people, whether they individually chose them or not, were chosen by the society to be allowed. And society did so knowing people would die.
I agree with DrDeth though…we’ve had this debate, we’ve all made these same old arguments, and none of you reading this are going to buy this argument any more than I am not going to roll my eyes at, once again, someone trotting out the choice and innocent deaths thingy. I’m not convinced. You aren’t convinced. No one else is going to shift their opinion on this…we all know what we know. And this is just another hijack of another thread that isn’t really about the gun debate but about some really awful parents who did some very bizarre shit that lead to a bunch of deaths. Regardless of the method of the deaths, we should all be able to agree on this, and I hope agree that said parents are complicit in this mess.
Awful, yes. Bizarre? I don’t see how you can claim that American parents giving their kids access to firearms is “bizarre” when it’s so common.
This shit didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened due to America’s gun culture. Pointing this our is hardly a hijack.
I believe that we’re talking specifically about kids being killed at school. Something like How many more of these are we going to have before we’ve had enough?
The question is whether society will continue to allow it. As I answered above, I think so, regardless of how many school shootings may be to come.
But how much overlap does a guidance counselor who typically preps students for college or vocational careers have experience with at risk students needing intervention? Our local districts have a career guidance counselor and a couple of LSW who work with students and families experiencing a variety of at risk environments/ behaviors.
They did more than just give him a gun, and even then, yeah…I think giving your disturbed teen boy a weapon rates is ‘bizarre’, but YMMV and all that. You also have them doing other things, at least reportedly that raise this to ‘bizzare’, though again, YMMV.
I think pointing this oar…our…out…is fine. 
Taking this into yet another gun debate raises it to a hijack, however…IMHO and all. But that’s fine. No mods seem to care, not sure if the OP cares, so hijack away. We can go through the same thing we’ve gone through multiple times. Perhaps if we all wish hard enough, there will be a different outcome. I hear that’s kind of the definition of crazy…
According to a neighbor, the parents would often leave the boy home alone with no phone while they went out bar hopping.
Jibes with the school’s account of the parents refusing to take off work to stay home with the boy.
No such people as those, such as Alex Jones, who deny that the Sandy Hook shootings actually happened? No such people as those who have forced parents of murdered first-graders to live in hiding?
Well, I am told that all three are locked up and not allowed to compare notes. I assume the kid’s lawyer will go for self defense if the jocks were bullying him. Otherwise insanity. The case with the parents should be more interesting. Are we going to hear about God gun rights and parental dominion over the child? I can’t imagine a defense.
In a case of obvious guilt, the job of the defense attorney is sometimes best accomplished by trying to mitigate the harm, not achieve outright exoneration. This means plea bargaining.
Michigan doesn’t have the death penalty, so there’s no bargaining to save the kid’s life, as we sometimes see in other high profile cases (I.e. the prosecutor agrees to no death sentence in exchange for a guilty plea). I have to doubt that the prosecutor would offer a realistic chance at parole, but if that’s on the table it might be worth avoiding a trial.
Or, it does go to trial (due to no offer of any sort of lesser sentence) we may see the defense not really oppose the guilt phase, but instead put on a vigorous presentation during sentence to argue that this kid was a victim of some combination of mental illness and bad parenting.
(Of course, my speculation may be way off, and you may be right that there is some insanity defense that they are going to run with. I don’t see it being realistic, though, unless there’s some theory that he thought he was living in a video game or something. The YouTube videos he made knock that down, don’t they? Also, self defense due to bullying isn’t credible; self defense with a gun would only apply to an imminent threat of deadly force)
Yeah, that also matches quite well with their “we run, we get a proper lawyer, good luck to you in jail and with the court-appointed defender” response, doesn’t it.
But again, sounds like there the authorities also bought into that this was something that required no more aggressive intervention.
The more information comes out, the more entrenched I become in my belief that this was a kid with intrinsic mental issues who was a victim of many things: lack of appropriate mental health care, a malignant gun culture, and recklessly bad parenting. I know that many might vehemently disagree with feeling any sense of sympathy toward the kid, but I do – a profound sense of sorrow not just about what he did, but the consequences he’s now facing as a mere 15-year-old who doesn’t yet even have a fully formed brain or mature emotions. That bit of news that recently came out about the kid routinely being left home alone while the parents went gallivanting around bars and nightclubs so that he had to knock on a neighbour’s door for help was just heartbreaking.
I predict a huge gap between what I would consider justice in this case, based on what is known so far, and what is very likely to actually happen. My prediction is that what will happen will be consistent with the demand for retribution by a mob out for blood, led by a prosecutor who seems emotionally invested in achieving exactly that. I think for that reason, the possibility of any plea bargain will be nil. I predict the kid will get a sentence equal to life without parole, although perhaps cast as several hundred years in prison, as judges like to do when they get really worked up about something. I also predict that when it comes to the parents, where the overwhelming burden of responsibility lies, all the gun nuts will come out of the woodwork to defend them as “responsible gun owners” who did nothing wrong, and it’s all the kid’s fault. It’s entirely possible that the parents will be found not guilty on all charges.
What I would consider justice would be for the kid to be involuntarily confined for mental health treatment for as long as it takes, but with a view to rehabilitation. I don’t know the exact legal basis for this in Michigan but in Canada it’s known as a finding of NCR – Not Criminally Responsible. And then transitioned for a time to a juvenile correctional facility, and finally released into the community with conditions like no guns allowed. And I’d like to see the parents convicted of involuntarily manslaughter and one or both sentenced to as much as the law allows.
And I know that I’m going to be sorely disappointed in the outcome.
It’s abhorrent that this is on the cards for a 15-year-old.
Consider this. If this kid had been born in a country without a gun fetish (i.e. pretty much any other country) the worst he’d likely be facing today is disiplinary action for breaking a bathroom mirror in anger, or acting out by getting in a fist fight with another kid.
I completely agree. Of course, the argument from the gun side is that the kid would instead have blown up the whole school with a tactical nuclear weapon, or something. 
Probably so.
I believe the kid could be quietly shifted to a mental institution if the parents become the focus of the media circus.
Or for using a knife or blunt object, but I agree with you.
But I think this is much less likely given the same circumstances and state of mind. The kid is not some serial killer bent on murder who might kill Colonel Mustard with the lead pipe in the billiard room instead of the revolver in the conservatory. This is ultimately about attention seeking, he wants infamy. The attraction of the gun is the spectacular carnage he can cause, turning the place into a war zone and hitting the headlines. Stabbing someone is serious enough that his own life would be devastated, but with none of the infamy.
So it’s not just that the amount of harm a person can easily cause with a knife or blunt object is far less. I think it’s far less likely to happen at all.