I am really sorry if I put this in the wrong place - I didn’t know where else to put it. It’s not mundane and pointless at all - it’s a horrible tragedy. But it doesn’t seem to “fit” ANYwhere.
Friend and I discussed this at lunch. Here are our questions:
Why is there a loaded gun accessible to children in that house?
If it wasn’t loaded, why did this child have access to the bullets and know how to load it?
How did the child get access to it without the parent knowing?
How did the child get it out of the house without the parent knowing?
Criminal negligence. It won’t bring back that poor innocent. I can see parents having trouble knowing everything that’s going on in an 18 y/o’s life, but to not be involved enough in your 6 y/o’s life to let this happen is sick! I also feel for the child that did it. I wonder what he thought the gun would do or the motives behind it.
More proof this is a fucked up society.
In the past I’ve actually talked to my six year old about what to do in the event he sees someone with a gun a school.
You know smug, all the laws in the world won’t protect people if the parents are too fucking stupid to keep their guns out of reach of their kids.
“I thought: opera, how hard can it be? Songs. Pretty girls dancing. Nice scenery. Lots of people handing over cash. Got to be better than the cut-throat world of yoghurt, I thought.” - Seldom Bucket
Everytime something like this happens, everyone at my worksite quivers and is sick to their stomachs. Its a pretty sad state of affairs when you have to have an emergency plan in case of violence in a school. We just completed ours.
When are people going to be responsible. The child that did the shooting will now have to live with this for the rest of their life. A big burden on a small child for something an adult could have prevented.
We are, each of us angels with only one wing,and we can only fly by embracing one another
The next sound you hear will be me, screaming and worrying, wondering if I should quit my job and move my kids out of this fucking town.
For those of you that don’t know, I’m from Flint. Yeah. Where this fucking miserable event occurred.
They aren’t going to prosecute the boy. Under Michigan law, the boy is too young to even know he committed a crime. He is not criminally liable. But if they can, they’re going to prosecute someone. I don’t know who. But it’s not going to be the gun owner, either. Guess why. All together now–“the gun was stolen!” That’s right. The news has reported that the gun was stolen. It was reported stolen in December.
The boy is in the custody of FIA (formerly DSS) right now. The family is apparently being very cooperative.
I’m going to go hug my kids now. They aren’t old enough to be in school, and even if they were, they wouldn’t go to that school, because we don’t live in that district.
While Flint is a high-crime city, we’ve never had a school shooting. There’s police liason officers and metal detectors in all of the junior-high & high schools. They don’t have them in the elementary schools. Why? Because they’re fucking elementary schools, that’s why. Who would think that a fucking first grader would bring a gun to school? No one, that’s who.
One more thing–it doesn’t fucking matter one fucking little bit whether or not this was an accident. Whoever didn’t lock that gun up & away from the boy needs to be prosecuted.
(Eutychus–feel free to clean up my language, if you think it’s necessary.)
Changing my sig, because Wally said to, and I really like Wally, and I’ll do anything he says, anytime he says to.
It amazes me that 6-year-olds even know what to do with a handgun! I would have NEVER thought of taking a gun to school at that age or any age! What is the matter with this world today! My dad would have kicked my ass if I would have even thought of touching one of his guns. We knew that they were for hunting and and we were never allowed to touch them and he always had them locked up and the ammo was never kept with them. With all of the school shootings in the past I think we really need to start educating our children on ways to handle their anger and frustrations. I think a lot of this comes from the violence they see on the news and in movies/tv shows, even cartoons. We’re desensitized to violence these days.
It’s very sad and my heart goes out to the families of both the victim and the shooter.
Accident? Buzz here is that this was a girl the boy had been fighting with the day before.
I’ll be interested to find out the full story. I can’t blame the gun owner if the gun was truly stolen, but that leaves the question as to who stole it, and who got it to the kid.
Where was the teacher who should have been watching the kids? Where was the boy’s parents that he could get a gun? Where did the gun owner have it so that it could be stolen so easy? Where was the gun manufacturer’s safety device that wouldn’t have let it be fired?
It will be interesting to see where the lawsuit falls.
You’re right, Satan. This had NOTHING to do with guns. One first-grader kills another first-grader with a gun, but it coulda happened just as easily with a paring knife, right?
Damn fucking right I’m blaming it on guns. How the devil was this going to happen without one?
The most that can be claimed is that the abundance of guns in our country saves other lives elsewhere. I personally don’t believe it, but the argument can be made.
But in this case here, a gun killed a little girl. Absent the gun, she would still be alive. Yes, I blame it on guns. Fire away.
Let’s see…so far, we’ve blamed it on guns, and we’ve blamed it on the media.
I blame it on irresponsibility.
gasp
What, no easy scapegoats? Nope.
Sure, you can blame it on the object. But how did the child get a hold of such an object? Irresponsibilty. One of the first rules of gun ownership is to keep a gun unloaded until you’re ready to use it, and to store the ammo away from where you store the weapon. I doubt any six-year-old would be able to pick the lock on a gun cabinet, and then find where the ammo is stored, and then load the gun himself. That gun was stored loaded and most likely unlocked. That’s irresponsible.
And who blamed the media? What kind of TV shows were you watching when you were that age? I sure as hell know that I spent my time watching Sesame Street, Nickelodeon, and Saturday morning cartoons. Meanwhile, there were plenty of cop shows with guns and stuff on them. Did I watch them? Hell no, I wasn’t allowed. I had someone monitoring what I watched at that age. Even IF it were the fault of the TV programs this kid watched (and I doubt that, but I’d be more willing to think so than if the kid were 14 and had a firm grasp on reality vs. fantasy), how was he watching them in the first place? Irresponsible parents were letting him, that’s how.
So yeah, I blame this on irresponsibility. Do the world a favor. If you’re going to pay so little attention to your six-year-old son that he can take a gun to school and shoot one of his first-grade classmates during finger-painting, do the world a favor and don’t breed.