Investment Industry’s Suicidal Self-Interest
http://toddweber.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/investment-industrys-suicidal-self-interest/

Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs)

Teaching a boy how to shoot a gun and teaching a boy when to shoot a gun are two separate but equally important parts of gun education. It would appear that the latter was absent in this case.

Get out of here. A single crackpot testifying before a Congressional committee is indicative of nothing.

The rampant firearms "accidents" among those who teach children to kill are all the proof you need. Yes, lots of kids are taught to hunt. But this causes lots of them to be killed, or to kill someone.

The real question is, how irrationally, emotionally invested in gun culture do must you be, to be in denial of these facts?

The difference seemed to be that I did not have access to "my gun" without my mother unlocking the gun cabinet and handing it to me when we were outside.

This kid was fucked up! The gun did not fuck him up.

The world has certainly changed. My father was on the rifle team in high school and rode the public bus everyday with his .22 rifle over his shoulder.

And it's only by virtue of our modern industry that's polluting the planet that we have the luxury of forgetting that to live is to kill. To teach a child to kill is no different than teaching him what it really means to live. Had he been taught how to prepare and cook meat would that have been abuse?

Historically, (male) children have been trained to hunt from a very young age. There's something else going on here.

i am by no means a gun nut either but i hunt (mostly large game with a bow). and i was hunting with my grandfather at the age of 3. granted as someone mentioned above i didnt have access to my guns when we were home.

Ok, what was the situation when the killing took place? Who was this other guy? Did the kid see this other guy doing something to another kid? We don't know. What we do know is that the gun did not magically take over the kid's psyche and command him to off his dad. Do bicycles make children let them go into a busy intersection, making cars swerve and crash? I was shooting .22s as well when I was younger than 10, and SURPRISE!, I have still never killed anyone. So if the inanimate object are clearly in command of humans, do baseballs and rocks make children throw them through windows?

Funny how I didn't murder anyone.

"In children as young as 8, parts of the brain that weigh decisions and consequences are so underdeveloped that a child might not understand the finality of death."

Also, two men couldn't disarm a .22 from an 8 year old? Kid must'a been a great shot, a .22 usually isn't good for much but target practice.

Read the whole NYT article where it gives the chances of having a child kill his parents in this fashion are almost impossible to figure out (in 29 years only 2 young children nationwide were investigated for killing their parents, etc).

Your arguments are so often slapped together from pieces made to order for your preconceived ideas......

Probably not. So yes the gun empowered this kid to commit these murders. Sans gun you have a violent tantrum and should the kid get a hold of knife or some other weapon that requires a little muscle behind it, a potentially nasty wound or two- but a double murder, not likely.

Does teaching a kid to kill animals create a people-murderer? Absolutely not. But giving a kid a gun creates the potential for murder and/or deadly accidents. Whether you like it or not, that's reality. Guns do kill people and in the instance where children are involved, create a serious risk where one (at least this one in particular) did not exist before.

I guess what I am saying here is this, idiot parents, don’t give your kid a gun. Or, when you get shot in the face, don’t expect my sympathy.

This isn't like the story of the dad and child with the uzzi at the driving range, that's closer to "it'd be real cute to see if this bear will lick my kid's hand" type shit.

What I mean to say is: although the gun was the instrument used in the killing (but seriously, an 8 year old killing a man with a .22 is a FREAK thing, a less than great shot could pump a few rounds into a grown man and still be disarmed by the victim), otherwise the scenario wasn't at all out of the norm.

being taught to kill without eating your prey - that's the abuse.

Being a very young child of divorce myself, I was often told by my Mom that I always had a changed attitude when I returned from my visits with Dad. And it was not a good attitude.

Could his Mom have had some impact on him causing him some kind of anger toward his father and the room mate? Could his Dad and room mate said something bad about his Mom?

My Dad was extremely bitter and verbally abusive. He ran my Mom into the ground telling me horrible things and calling her horrible names on my weekend with him. When I was young I had no clue I was a total brat upon my return to Mom. Being older and looking back I can see it.

Also, in today’s world the kids are bombarded with violent video games, movies and TV shows. Could that play any role in his desensitization?

I too was raised on a farm over 300 acres and grew up hunting and shootin’ skeet. We had every kind of gun; shot guns, rifles and hand guns. Guns in every closet, under beds, in the kitchen pantry and a gun rack in the truck. Everyone in my family did. No one ever had any kind of accident or an urge to kill people.

There has to be more to it with the boy. I’d say the evaluation should turn up the truth. I will not be surprised if it has something to do with the divorce of his parents.

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