I agree. Why he killed them IS relevant.
Thank god he had guns and training. The poor tyke would have had trouble slashing them both dead with a knife.
What I don’t get is why people get so outraged seeing kids in 3rd world countries learning how to use guns but it’s not a problem teaching our own kids.
If I teach my putative 10 year old child how to fire a pistol, or small caliber rifle, I would be doing so for a number of relatively harmless reasons: Shooting can be fun, and target shooting can be a way to demonstrate the need for discipline when having fun. If, however, I’m handing him an AK-47, and making him fight - I’m putting him into a sausage grinder that can destroy the sanity and humanity of a fully developed adult. Doing that to a child is always going to raise questions in my mind.
If the alternative is genocide, such as what’s happening to the refugees in the Sudan, I can’t condemn the action. Short of that sort of situation it seems to me to be a counsel of desperation. The man I know who had been in the Hitler Jugend claims he wasn’t very effective a soldier at 14. When he got drafted for Korean service by the US Army, he was old enough to be an effective soldier. (Though, his DI put him into a position of recruit authority as soon as he found out he had a vet in his ranks. Yes, Hans is a vet of both the Wehrmacht, and the US Army.)
So maybe I picked the wrong title for this thread. Yes, in a perfect world this wouldn’t have happened. It was just some serious R.O., I mean JEEZ! He’s EIGHT!
And yet, despite what common sense would tell us, child soldiers recover pretty well, thankfully. You have to subsribe to New Scientist to get the full story, but you can see from the introduction where it is heading.
That’s right. I’ve read enough of these threads to understand. He could have killed them with a swimming pool.
You know, you really picked the perfect username.
I’m not going to comment on the facts of this case, but I am bugged in general by the whole “trying a child as an adult” thing. It seems to defy logic. If you can arbitrarily decide that an eight-year-old counts as an adult in one particular case, what’s the point of having a separate juvenile justice system? The only explanation I’ve ever heard is “he committed a grown-up crime so he should be tried as a grown-up.” This fails to make sense to me on more than one level.
First, the system is supposed to treat him as innocent until proven guilty, so how can he be judged to have committed a grown-up crime when he hasn’t even been proven to have committed a crime at all?
Second, it muddles the definition of adulthood and the entire rationale for treating children differently under the law. If an eight-year-old is not mature enough to be held fully responsible for stealing a candy bar, how can he be mature enough to be held fully responsible for murder? Are we saying that the act of killing someone proves that he is preternaturally mature? Why would anyone think that?
If the juvenile system doesn’t provide harsh enough punishments for really bad crimes, the legislature should fix it. Why should we have to introduce paradoxes into the legal system?
So I can. Thanks, amarone. The guy I mentioned is pretty level-headed himself. I just didn’t realize he wasn’t quite as exceptional as I’d thought. 
I do agree with some of your concerns. But let’s consider something like the youthful offender from this thread I wrote this summer. I do not think that he should have been considered automatically eligible for release upon his majority at 21.
The legislature can’t really fix the juvenile crime laws, to hold him, because that would have been ex post facto law, and that’s unconstitutional, AIUI.
Oddly. what bothered me most in this story was the fact that the police are pushing to have an 8 year old child tried as an adult ! That’s just…disturbing. Yeah, the murder is terrible and all too, but an 8 year old is not an adult, I don’t care if he ripped the head off a priest and shoved it up his dog’s ass, he’s still a child.
Just a WAG, but if he’s convicted as a minor, he’s free to go at 18. Convicted as an adult, the courts probably have more leeway to keep him longer if they think they’ve got a serial killer developing.
Sorry about bringing up guns and children in relation to someone shot to death by a child, but whatareyagonnado? I just found this story rather bizarre,
The priest suggested without saying explicitly that he had counseled against it. For the life of me, I can’t imagine consulting a priest over a question like this.
Outsourcing. Do you want to see all killings migrate to where labour is cheapest?
While your WAG may be correct, I see a problem with this theory: he’s eight years old.
While I can begrudgingly agree that there are some 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds which it is appropriate to try as an adult, when we start doing that at younger and younger ages, my agreement tends to dissipate. Eight is right out.
When he gets out a 18, his formative years will have been spent imprisoned. A lot of adults who spend 10 years behind bars have trouble readjusting, but a child? He’ll wind up straight back in there.
Your point is not clear to me. Is it that we may as well go ahead and slap him in for life now?
Frankly, I’m also not real certain that the juvenile system is appropriate for an eight-year-old. It’s not going to do him any good to be locked up with a bunch of teenagers either.
There needs to be an age appropriate resolution, or it’s not justice.
You win the thread, but you’re also a horrible person.
The wholy story smacks of Darwin Award candidacy to me.
Personally, this tragedy says more about divorce than gun control or anything gun related.