A 14-year-old boy allegedly fatally shot his older sister in Florida after a family argument over Christmas presents, officials said Tuesday.
The teen had been out shopping on Christmas Eve with Abrielle Baldwin, his 23-year-old sister, as well as his mother, 15-year-old brother and sister’s children, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference.
The teenage brothers got into an argument about who was getting more Christmas presents.
“They had this family spat about who was getting what and what money was being spent on who, and they were having this big thing going on in this store,” Gualtieri said.
You really think any sane rational FOURTEEN year old would just shoot their sister solely because of a Christmas gift?
I’m not saying 14 year olds have adult mental capacity and decision making … but by that age you KNOW what a gun goes and you KNOW you can’t take it back.
Either there’s more to the story or this kid definitely has some kind of mental disorder or mental distress that they needed to see a therapist about.
Maybe the more to the story is that he thought he could just scare her by pointing the gun at her or her thought it was empty … and it wasn’t/the gun went off. If that’s the case, then the parents really screwed up having a gun in the house, not teaching the kid anything about gun safety, and allowing the kid across to the gun (granted again by 14 you’re pretty smart … the average 14 year old could probably figure out the code or were the keys are kept on a gun safe because I know most people do not follow best practices with any passwords or keys).
And before you make any assumptions like you did with the other person, I’ve voted for Democrats in every election, donated some significant money to their campaigns, and I do not own a gun and do not have any restrictions that prevent me from owning a gun, I’ve just decided that for me … particularly with living alone and a (granted not recent) history of depression that included suicidal thoughts … they’re not a good thing to have around. I avoid alcohol for similar reasons.
Thoughts and prayers might be a meaningless response but a huge block of the population has said “we’re not giving up our guns” … come to think of it … just like a huge block of the population has said “we’re not giving up our alcohol” (as is their right at the polls).
There is a majority that would like to see some common sense gun reform and we should do that. However, I believe the right has a point about mental health and guns. What they don’t have is the willingness to fund mental health systems and instead they blame all the mental health issues on a degraded culture (🙄). We need to bring mental health back into the conversation with information from professionals. They also have a point about teaching kids about gun safety, if we’re going to keep guns, then it’s a public disservice to not teach kids (or at least the kids of gun owners) “this is what a gun is, don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill” and “there’s a difference between pretend and reality, these are never for pretend” as a baseline.
Yes. Countless stories of children murdering their parents over this stuff. It’s very common. Remember that the country is big with lots of people so you’re going to see these things from time to time-it’s statistically likely to happen.
What are you arguing here? That it happens and it’s not mental illness because there are so many people that it’s bound to happen?
No. That with that many people, there are enough whackos that this sort of thing will constantly be in the news even though when compared to the population size the events are still extraordinarily rare.