6-Year-Old Virginia Boy in Custody After Shooting Teacher

https://lawandcrime.com/crime/this-...eaves-teacher-with-life-threatening-injuries/

They need to make an example out of these parents. Charge these parents with
§ 18.2-56.2. Allowing access to firearms by children; and put them in jail for a year.

Plus they should make a law that any parent who allows a child under the age of 14 to access a gun is criminally responsible for every action taken. Those parents should be charged with conspiracy aggravated assault with a deadly weapon as well and see if a jury will convict.

 

Yes, so then they can put the kid in a foster home where he can grow up to be screwed up for life more than they would be anyway. What about other forms of killing people? Should they do the same? If your 6 yr old kid takes your car and runs over someone, should the parents be convicted there too and sent to jail for a year? What about a baseball bat? Knife?

Yes, the parents should be more responsible and teach their kids right from wrong and not do drugs and not join gangs. That would be a good start.

 

I agree the parents should be held partially responsible for the death... if there is strong evidence the gun came from the parents.

I disagree about them being specifically punished simply just for allowing access to a firearm to their child, but they should be punished because of the end result that accompanied it.

I mostly disagree about "making an example" out of people, for this. But in this case, a year would be sufficient. Maybe 6 months for each parent, if both were equally to blame. If the teacher had died, then the punishment should be worse, maybe 14 months for the parent who was responsible.

We should also not forget, the child is partially responsible too. They should not be held responsible anywhere near the same level as an older person, but they should still face punishment. Maybe 16 months in a juvenile delinquent punishment camp. A 6 year old child should have known that doing this was very wrong.

 

I think you're painting this with too broad a brushstroke.
Yes, the parents perhaps should be held partially responsible for the actions of their child in this situation, but parents should not be held responsible for the actions of their child in every situation, or their responsibility should be to different degrees, depending on the age of the child and the situation.

I really wouldn't trust a law to be properly worded for every situation similar to this one.

I know anything more complicated than black and white, either-or, is hard for most people to comprehend, but we can't always use one specific situation as a template for how to handle all other similar situations.

At some point, the child begins to have responsibility for their own actions. Maybe not entirely, as much as an adult, but more and more. 9 and 10 year olds can choose to commit murder.

Sometimes in conservative areas they start a 9 year old child off with a bow and arrow. If the child were to - all of a sudden completely out of the blue - malevolently try to kill someone with it, should the parents be held criminally responsible? I find that absurd.
Same thing if the child tried to kill another child with a baseball bat.

Yes, a gun is not entirely the same thing, but it's not entirely completely different either.

You ask a question in the poll of your thread, but the question is not necessarily exactly the same as the argument in your opening post.

In my opinion, it greatly depends on the situation, the extent to which the parents should be held responsible. And I could even imagine some situations where the parents should not be held criminally responsible at all.

 

Should parents have to lock up their car keys in a combination lock safe too, for fear of being prosecuted?

Prosecuted for not locking up their electric power tools, or having a table saw in the garage that's not locked?

 

so we should not put people in foster homes?

 

I think we could punish the child at the same time the parents are being punished.

The 6 year old is not completely innocent.

Maybe at 3 or 4, that might be a different story.

 

agree, and a new environment may be good for the child

 

Here's another angle of this to consider. In many instances, when a parent leaves a loaded gun just sitting around in their home, and recklessly allows a small child wandering throughout the home to be able to find it, the gun was illegally obtained. (Think drug-using ghetto trash parents)
Now, what if the child brought the gun somewhere else and then the parents claimed the gun was not theirs and that the child must have got it from somewhere else?

Should the parents be punished anyway because we assume they are probably lying?

Do we need to prove that the gun came from the parents, and that they had acted recklessly, in order to punish them? Or do we just punish them a little less, if we're not entirely certain? How do we know which parent was the one responsible? Or do we just apply the concept of group responsibility, since they were both living in the home?
The gun might even have come from an older brother who is a gang member.

 

then they fingerprint the gun, the bullets, search the house for bullets that match, etc....

 

The evidence will not always be clear and totally indisputable.

People like to assume that police will always be able to prove something. That is very often not the case. Police can find evidence, but that might only point us towards the direction of a certain conclusion, or indicate a probability that someone is guilty.

 

To answer the poll question...

If they are white: Lock them up forever!

If they are not white: Probation, family counseling.

 

Here's something else to consider. Owners of dogs are often held criminally and financially liable when their dog attacks someone.
Should it also be the case with parents who have children?

All I'm saying is everyone seems to be putting all the focus on the gun, but the issue is much wider than that.

A child could hurt or kill someone else with all sorts of things. It's less likely than with a gun, but it is still a possibility.

A gun is not completely different from a child attacking someone with something else.

 

nope, we see Trump and folks lie and take the 5th all the time, we know not talking and taking the 5th is ones best option, as then one has to prove it

what I was saying, if they do that though and do not confess, should get the MAX sentence ... if it's proved

 

That depends on exactly what "proved" is being used to mean. There can very often be a spectrum, very often "proved" does not mean 100% certainty.

Imagine for example the 6 year old lied and said he found the gun lying around his home, because he didn't want to get in trouble (for stealing it from somewhere else, being somewhere else where he was not supposed to be) or was trying not to get someone else in trouble. (May not have realized that the parents would get in trouble because of the lie)

I can also imagine situations where vengeful ex-girlfriends might try to set a man up by moving his gun to a place where the child will be sure to find it.
In this case it may not have been the parent's fault who lived with the child, but everyone will assume it was because the gun belonged to that parent.

 

that means they proved it to a jury

 

Juries do not always get it right and are not omniscient.

Maybe we should be a little careful before we pass new laws that could get some people convicted who might not have actually broken that law?

At the very least, I think some of these new laws should set a higher burden of evidence than traditional laws that have always existed and which everyone agrees is necessary.

So I will not support these laws unless they explicitly state in their wording that a higher burden of evidence should be required for conviction.

I also disagree with the notion that it should be possible for someone to be punished with a wrongful conviction because they legally registered a gun and complied with the law. I think that is exactly what could happen, in many instances, if this sort of law were passed.

 

perfectly ok with punishing irresponsible gun owners

 

Some people's definition of "irresponsible" may differ a little bit from other people.

Probably largely along the lines of whether they are a gun control proponents, what region of the country they live in, even whether you are asking a male or female.

Like I've stated before, this is not entirely a black and white thing, and there are many different levels of wrong.

I strongly suspect these sort of laws would inevitably end up being used in ways that I don't agree with, in several cases.

 

How can you say that? You don't even have all the details yet about this specific news story.

Isn't it conceivably at least a small possibility these parents did not do anything that was wrong, or did something that was not anywhere near being as wrong as you are jumping to the conclusion of?

 

How about America ask their congresscritters to make some public service announcements about allowing children to access guns?

 

If it becomes a crime to let a child hold a gun, under any situation, I have no doubt that eventually it will be made a crime to let a child have a BB gun or a pocket knife.

Gun culture and gun rights are kind of like a dam holding back all sorts of other ridiculous nanny-state things Progressives would like to do.
Eventually everyone in society is going to be kept in pink-padded rooms and it will have become normalized to not trust anyone with anything the slightest bit dangerous. (We can already see what sort of ridiculous laws have been passed in the U.K. and certain states in Australia, a little peak into the future)

I actually support the parents being punished in this specific news story. But I fear this is just going to be used as leverage to take an anti-gun agenda further.

 

when ones 6 year old takes a gun to school and shoots the teacher

 

I very much doubt any new law alleging to address this issue will be worded so narrowly.

How about we just skip this law and get directly to the policy of passing all children through metal detectors on their way into public school?
I know you progressives would support that and will eventually get around to doing it.

 

the parents in this story best hope no pictures out there like that one

would not help the civil case one bit