It's not just parenting. There are crap parents worldwide, yet this only regularly happens in one place.
E: downvote all you want. Remove my comment if you want. You know it to be true. This is a US thing. Stop worshiping your guns.
And if you are to have them, keep them in a safe, inaccessible to children, when not in use. The fact that this is a controversial statement to Americans is insane.
You can't just handwave away gun problems as "oh it's the parent's fault, nothing can be done"
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.
Well fuck me for being born into a different environment ig. Mass downvoting
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is legal to hunt at 12 years old in some states.
Edit: I bought enough trigger locks for all my long guns and pistols for under $100. There is no excuse not to have them installed and I live alone. My guns are also in a locker as well as trigger locked. My ammo is in a different room in a safe box screwed to the closet floor from inside the locked box. All this was well under $200 including the gun locker.
I don't think there's an age limit for hunting in my country, either. I did have a couple of shotguns for the purpose.
To get a license for them I had to pass an exam identifying all game, even by silhouette. And I had to pop in for a quick interview at the police station before applying for a weapon's license.
I feel like those hoops would filter out 95% of those looking to get weapons fpr illicit purposes. In the case of a handgun, you'd need to show a long-lasting interest in either range shooting or hunting game that hide in dens.
I doubt THAT'S why the kid had a gun. It was easier to buy one in my high school than to get one as an adult (even with a good income) where I grew up in NYC.
That's... A take for sure. By all means, take your kid hunting and target practicing that young, instill good practices in them, but there's a big gulf between that and a teenager ever being in the situation in the article.
Alright, you seem to have identified the problem now what do you think the solution is?
Gun violence seems to be the worst in the areas with the most guns, is that just a human issue?
“Hopes and prayers, constitution ties our hands, we’ve done all we can do, it’s the parent’s fault, he played too much red dead redemption, if all the bus passengers had guns this wouldn’t have happened….”
Start taxing the SHIT out of ammo, Chris Rock had a great idea, we just need to make it law.
This is a gun thread. But if you’re implying that taxing gas has not stopped Americans from driving big ass trucks, realize that the USA does not nearly tax gas as much as other modern nations and in fact we subsidize it. In most other countries few people drive big ass trucks precisely because it’s so expensive.
Ammunition reloading is already alive and well in America and an amazing money savings versus buying new. Saved brass is paid for an smaller caliber rounds are cheap, like a dime per bullet (.223); ultimately it would spread dirt cheap methods of self production and selling brass casings as something innocuous like "paper weights".
Gun nuts always find a way to circumvent law. See defining "assault rifle" for example.
I concur. I used to work in the service industry in a non gun friendly state and still ran into two guys who made their own ammo. Also sold to friends.
While I do think this situation is tragic all around, I feel the need to post the definition of "Joke" from Wikipedia:
"A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means."
And so I think his comment was an absolutely valid joke. You can joke about horrible things and still remain respectful. Actually it's a very therapeutic and didactic thing to do, if done right.