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.
Why does a 13-year-old have access to guns?
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 talk about how much America loves guns and it’s military and I get downvoted all the time. And I say that as a left-leaning armed American.
Sorry that facts hurt people’s feelings. We literally had school shootings involving kindergartners a decade ago and nothing has changed. Nothing.
It’s not guns, it never was done. It’s lack of good education, farming it out like it’s just some subscription thing. People aren’t learning practical information in schools. We don’t teach kids how to think, or how to deal with anger in their mind. And they get up and they grow up to be these idiot full grown adults who don’t know how to think past them not liking a person because of skin color, they go with their first wins because they’re idiots, they get a hold of guns because only idiots need guns. And then they do something stupid. Thinking it’s just guns is fucking stupid. Guns don’t hurt people people do blah blah blah, it’s true people suck now. They’re dumb they don’t read and they should shoot themselves in the head next time
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.
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.
He didn’t say it was good age. He simply stated what his life experience was.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 need to get some sleep. I read that as
It is legal to hunt 12 year olds in some states
And thought this 13-year old had a gun after the age he needed it for protection…lmao
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.
You might want to keep that info to yourself in real life. You’re the rare motherfucker who’s got a lot of guns and is easy to rob lmao.
at 13 you should be able to be trosted with a gun. tthis is a parenting issue.
So strange that you would make this comment on an article that perfectly exemplifies why we don’t let children walk around with guns.
This same person told me in another thread that the reason guns should be legal in the U.S. is protection against bears and mountain lions- which almost never attack anyone. Like less than 100 times in the last 50 years combined. They can’t even come up with a good argument for adults to have guns.
I literally can’t wrap my head around the US’s culture.
Guns for 13 year olds? Yes.
Some beer? Are you crazy?!
That’s not all of our culture. We’re not all the same person and, as you can clearly see, that guy’s attitude is not at all approved of lol
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?
Not who you replied to, but I personally feel it’s more than just guns.
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.
We need to change our culture, our respect for guns, and ultimately give people better tools for solving conflicts. The solution isn’t necessarily more laws, they can certainly be a part of it, but we aren’t going to legislate this problem away.
If you are a gun owner, promote better safety with firearms. Call out those who treat them irresponsibly. If you are around those that act like they are the solution to all problems, give them shit for it. Make them realize it’s not a proportional response to kill someone for a minor disagreement or property theft. Call people out who brandish their firearm - it’s not a de-escalation.
Realize that not everyone is a threat and trying to harm you or your family. The people who are going to harm or kidnap you are so incredibly rare that you are unlikely to ever encounter them. And the situation where you don’t have any other options but to kill them is even rarer. Most situations you can find a way to just leave. I’m not saying that there aren’t dangerous people out there, but the vast majority are generally nice people that just want to live their own lives.
If you aren’t a gun owner, take a safety class and learn a little about them. You don’t have to like them or own one, but try to understand that there are many who do enjoy them. The majority of gun owners aren’t the ones causing issues.
As a society, put more time and money into healthcare and particularly mental healthcare. Work to raise people out of poverty and remove the socioeconomic pressures that lead many towards crime. We need to spend more time with each other, see things from each other’s point of view, and break down barriers between each other. We need to be more empathetic. We need to learn to accept losing in disagreements. Make it okay to be wrong.
Some of these arent truly concrete steps, but more of an ideal we need to work towards. But ultimately, it’s our culture that needs to change. Our culture treats them as a solution to problems and that’s why we see them used for even the dumbest of issues like a blocked aisle on a bus.
