Tuesday, October 06, 2015

It's not just the mass shootings....

Tonight in Memphis, the mother of an 8 year old girl is mourning her death.  A life cut tragically short not because an 11 year old child lacks impulse control.  While he did pull the trigger of the single-shot 12 gauge shotgun that belonged to his father, the fact that his father did not take actions to prevent this child from picking up the gun and murdering another child is the real cause.  The 11 year old is in juvenile detention while the father is free.  The father should be in an adult jail, facing a homicide charge under the doctrine of depraved indifference.

There isn't a single gun control law in the world that will prevent this particular type of tragedy.  Oh, we can pass a law that makes this a serious crime with long jail sentences for those gun owners who refuse to ensure their guns aren't accessible to anyone who shouldn't have an opportunity to use them.  You can run background checks, mental health checks and any other check you like; and it won't stop this if a parent won't lock up a gun so a child can't kill with it.

When the Founding Fathers wrote that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed upon, they weren't thinking of 11 year old children in a nation where the life expectancy is so much longer than it was back then. 

The gun nuts are right.  Guns don't kill.  People kill.  However when you put a gun into the hands of a child, someone is going to die.  Maybe the child.  Maybe the parent.  Maybe an innocent, as happened here.  But this could have been prevented.  If only the adult had shown maturity and acted like an adult.  How sad that the lack of maturity of a man has cost a mother a lifetime of a daughter's love. 

I am not just angry.  I am disgusted.