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.
I had my own gun and access to guns as a 13 year old. Hunting, target practice, etc. It’s not an insane age to have firearms.
That said, I was raised to respect the fuck out of the danger inherent in a gun, and I used mine to kill deer for food, not kill people I had a mild disagreement with.
Edit: Well fuck me for being born into a different environment ig. Mass downvoting someone for offering a different perspective is healthy for an online community /s
I got beat regularly, and my stepfather at the time used to do stuff like make me wait in the basement for 30 mins, then he’d slowly walk down the stairs with his belt unbuckled so we could hear the jingling in each step, then he’d tell us some scriptures and say this hurt him more than us.
Then if you cried right away it was faking, but if you held on too long it was you being rebellious and stubborn, so my brother and I learned to start faking our cries after the 6th or 7th hit.
I told that to friends as an adult as what I thought was a kinda funny story, and they properly realized I was abused in a somewhat sadistic way and pointed it out to me.
They weren’t calling me out for having a different environment, they were correcting my incorrect belief that it was normal or acceptable.
People are doing the same for you. You made it out safely, but giving unstable teens access to guns is definitely a risk that probably shouldn’t be taken. Survivor bias isn’t an excuse to say it’s fine.
Hahaha we sound very similar. I’ve definitely told stories like that to my close friends thinking they’re funny and they’re horrified.
The sight or sound of someone, especially a man, taking off their belt still triggers the ol’ CPTSD decades later lmao.
Anyway, that was a great example. I grew up in a similar place with similar gun culture as them, and had to figure out for myself what you mentioned in your comment. I definitely think a bit of that is at play here.
Are you sure that is the reason? Maybe it could be that posting that 13 is a good age for gun ownership in a thread about a 13 year old who used it wildly inappropriately? You are entitled to think what you want, I just personally find it a little distasteful everytime there is a gun death to make justifications about the system that allowed it to happen. I imagine others agree.
He didn’t say it was good age. He simply stated what his life experience was.
He didn’t simply state what his life experience was. He said the age is “not insane”.
Which, tbf, is not the same as saying it’s a “good” age.
Eh, I feel like most people wouldn’t disagree with the statement “it’s insane to allow 13 year olds to own guns”, and the argument of “well I owned guns at 13 and I turned out fine” isn’t a strong one.
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absolutely insane age to have access to a gun unsupervised lmfao
I hunted, shot targets, and protected the farm from predators and varmints safely for years because I was taught religiously and throughly since I was a small child what the responsibilty of wielding a firearm is. Firearms are tools designed to end lives, and they are very, very good at it. There are no take-backs, no do-overs. Each time you touch a firearm, a life could end, and you NEED to be absolutely 100% certain it’s the life you mean to take.
It’s a great crushing weight that many adults, much less 13 year olds, should not be trusted with, but some 13 year olds can bear that responsibility well, as I did. There were never any accidents, because there could not be accidents.
One thing that I constantly have to remind myself is that people I’m debating with live a vastly different life experience. So many people who are so antigun clearly live in an urban or suburban environment and cannot fathom living somewhere rural enough that defending livestock from predators or hunting for food is a fact of life.
And some that are so pro-gun live in rural areas and don’t get the issues that dense populations where guns are cause issues.
Personally, I don’t think guns are the main problem. It’s the culture around guns, the worship of guns, the lack of better conflict resolution skills, the rise of extremist echo chambers, and harmful rhetoric online.
Even the “come and try to take them” and “fuck around and find out” attitude implicitly says that guns are going to solve whatever conflict people have and that it’s a valid solution equal with other options. The rhetoric doesn’t tell people that it’s the option of last resort for conflicts.
🏅
Hear you however not, most, aren’t like that rural or not. There are stories of kids harming and getting harmed by guns.
Best friend grew up in Arizona and got accidentally shot by his friend as kids roughly the same age. Ended up with a bad leg his whole life from it.
Children should not have guns period. Just my opinion
The biggest part of gun laws is checking for responsible ownership. You are allowed to get hunting guns in most of the countries that the right says “ban guns”. They just have common sense checks, like do you have training at a shooting range, do you understand gun safety, do you have a gun safe, are you not a psychopath prone to fits of violence? Your upbringing wouldn’t be any different because your parents were responsible and would have passed all those checks.
This is about not giving a gun to every dumbass yahoo that stumbles into a store. The household this kid grew up in obviously wasn’t responsible because this kid has unsupervised access to a gun.
Gotta love being down voted because “America bad” mixed with “guns bad”
Lemmy sure is a weird mixture of people wanting to arm themselves (or allow others to arm) against an increasingly fascist state while some want all guns to be gone forever and think voting and talking is the only way to enact change. These types are also usually the ones who complain about peaceful protestors being mildly inconvenient to others, and shrug their shoulders when the people they watched beat another person nearly to death get a slap on the wrists because “that’s justice for you, whaddaya gonna do”
And it really depends on which group gets to the comments first as to how the votes and conversations go.
A properly run society with good living conditions, social programs, medical/psychological care absolutely can have guns, and there are several examples in europe alone.
But you know… America bad.
I’m a leftist that’s cool with guns and was raised around them, and technically, not legally, owned my first gun at 11.
A 13 year old still should not have access to guns anywhere in public without adult supervision. I get hunting, I get protecting the farm, etc. None of those involve taking a gun on public transport though.
And yeah, America bad. If this was even remotely a significant issue anywhere else, we could say otherwise, but it’s not.
America is bad. Just look at the story these comments are about.
Can you show me where the downvotes hurt them or you?
It’s 33/33 so I’d say your comment is very “center”
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.