Denver police have arrested a 13-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting a man whose leg was blocking the aisle on a public bus.
Denver police have arrested a 13-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting a man whose leg was blocking the aisle on a public bus.
Kids much younger than 13 know right from wrong, and are capable of understanding the harm they can cause. I don’t want to live in a society that thinks the problem here is “13” rather than “psychopath”.
Societal expectations for teens are far too low. We infantilize tweens and teens. We set our expectations so low that even when they outright murder someone, we blame everyone else.
If he’s murdering people at age 13, he learned how to be a scumbag criminal before he could talk.
The problem here is untrained, unrestricted and unsupervised access to guns. You’re right that we don’t want psychos owning guns in general, not just 13 year olds. Look up the steps to getting a gun in Canada, you just need to take a safety course and pass some background checks. That’s to add assurance that gun owners know what they’re doing, and aren’t psychos. In this case the kid had unrestricted access to a gun without supervision, because his parents were either untrained to understand proper storage, or irresponsible. Training is a big part of keeping guns out of the hands of people who have not been verified to be responsible to own a gun unsupervised, like this kid.
The problem here is a 13-year-old actually, seriously, wanted to kill someone. Not just got angry or frustrated. It wasn’t unintentional, negligent, or accidental. He deliberately and knowingly decided to kill.
Take away the guns, and the bigger problem remains.
No, we absolutely should not be stereotyping every 13-year-old because this irredeemable piece of shit happened to be that age when he decided to kill.