An 11-year-old Great Falls boy accused of the negligent homicide of a 10-year-old boy could, if convicted, face juvenile detention until he's an adult, according to documents filed Monday by the Cascade County Attorney's Office.This is something all gun owners can be proud of, especially the tough, personal-responsibility types. I mean, why would the dad have to answer for something like this? He did his best to teach the boy.
Better would be if we lock up old Greg for a year or so, take his gun rights away, which he obviously is not responsible enough to handle, and give the kid some kind of juvenile counselling and probation.Gregg Zindell told GFPD detectives that he had taught his son "strict, strict, strict rules" about gun safety, including that he should only shoot under adult supervision, that he should keep the gun's bolt open until ready to fire and that other people should be at least five feet behind when he is shooting.
Gregg Zindell told detectives that his son wasn't even allowed to point toy guns at others, court documents stated.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
I tried leaving a comment previously, and it disappeared. I'll try again.
ReplyDeleteThis appears to be an accident, not an intentional shooting. Kids do stupid shit, even kids who have 'strict rules'; they do them more when parents are away than when they are home. Pubescent boys tend to do even more stupid things at this age, including their attraction to the glamor and power of weapons, than girls do.
The father was negligent in not having a trigger lock with a key on this gun, which he allowed the boy to keep in his closet per the newspaper article.
Only the dead boy will show up on the statistics; but clearly there are a lot of victims here. My heart goes out most to the family of the deceased boy.
I hope that because this was not an intentional shooting of anyone that no one does time behind bars; this has to be leaving a terrible set of scars on both the boy and his father (and presumably mother? I wondered why she wasn't mentioned in the article).
The father was negligent, horribly negligent, but I don't think he should do time behind bars for it. Rather a whopping big wrongful death suit makes more sense to me - take away pretty much everything he owns. And yes - don't let him own guns anymore if his negligence resulted in a death.
Putting him behind bars punishes us as much as it punishes him; incarceration is terribly costly.
No penalty that we can impose as a society is going to equate to the death of this poor boy. At least the parents could do something useful with the money (like maybe lobby for better gun laws, or set up a scholarship in their son's name?). They can't do anything constructive with having either the boy or his father behind bars.
I would feel differently if this were an intentional shooting about the prison sentence.
I started baby sitting when I was 12; I took a class that covered things like first aid. No one ever addressed the subject of guns in the home; I knew kids who played with their parents' guns - exclusively those were their father's guns. Because my own father refused to teach me about firearms (he didn't think it was ladylike) I felt less capable of dealing with that behavior. I never wanted to find myself having to take a gun away from some crabby kid who didn't want to go to bed when I told him to do so.
Kids and gun storage / safety is an issue; I still can't believe that there is an attempt to make it illegal to ask about it. We need to be asking more about it, not less.
Or consider deaths like this acceptable - I don't.
I'm not a big believer in the jail part of the punishment when negligence is the cause. But those gun rights have got to go.
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