Not the Megadeth LP of the same title, no, but a bit of a tongue-in-cheek social commentary here.
Mind you, I'm going off of just what the media reported a number of days ago, and simply writing my gut reaction to it all. The report concerns the (local to me) story about a 15 year old who shot his dad because his father cut off his Internet access.
The guts of the story as I read it:
- Kid posted suicidal stuff (spent most of his days) on MySpace.
- Got talked out of it.
- Friends in Florida called the cops local to the kid.
- Local cops visited, spoke with Mom,
- who said she wasn't worried, and would be sure to lock up guns and ammo.
- Dad found out about MySpace postings, so banned him from posting on MySpace.
- Kid got more suicidal,
- skipped school one day,
- wandered into the garage,
- found dad's 12 gauge and shells,
- loaded it,
- planned to shoot himself in front of dad,
- then changed plans to shoot dad THEN himself,
- Finally, shot his dad in the back of the head when his father got home,
- called a friend,
- friend talked kid out of killing himself and told him to call the police,
- kid did,
- and ... here's where my opinion-o-meter got fired up: is going to be tried as an adult.
My first thought was "he's at that fucked up age where his moral compass is already 'iffy' and it's clear he's more fucked up than most, so maybe they can redeem him if he gets the treatment he so clearly needs" but when I read that final line I figured all hope for this boy is lost. There is no way that kid will go through this system and come out okay in the end. They may as well just fry him, put him out of what is obviously misery.
How much of this reflects my real feelings and how much is just disgust with the criminal justice system and how young people are treated is left up to the judgement of the reader.
He shot his dad. He was insane with fifteen-year-olditude and tore apart his family. To try him as a (sane) adult is madness. They should all get seriously counseled through all this and if possible, allowed a chance to reunite. Otherwise, he serves as a warning to others and to accomplish THAT, we should be hanging people in the public square.
Yeah. Agree with you and Don.
Kid was demonstrably suicidal, but the prosecutors think he's mentally competent to stand trial? As as adult?
Un-frakking-believable.
Redeem him?
Counsel him?
Rehabilitate him?
Fat chance. Would you open your door to him after he has done the perquisite course of rehabilitation?
I sure as fuck wouldn't.
prerequisite.
I've never really grasped the concept of charging a kid as an adult. That seems so incongruous to me. A kid's not an adult, a kid's a kid. I don't see how the severity of the crime has any bearing on whether or not a kid is mature enough to be treated as an adult. Shit, I think a lot more adults need to be charged as juveniles, to be honest. And I'm certainly not saying that when a kid commits a heinous crime he/she shouldn't be severely punished. But I firmly believe that, if we're going to say kids are 17 and younger and adults are 18 and older, charges and sentencing should be tailored to that scale.
Seems like the Trendendez brothers were tried as adults.
The "justice system" is about puritanical blame and punishment, not about fixing people. Modern psychiatry is about finding somebody else to blame, if all of medicine was still at its level people would be croaking from hangnails.
The kid ain't going to get fixed unless he just plain survives the shitstorm and fixes himself. Which is not likely.
In one place he said "I hate my dad, couldn't take it anymore" and in another place he said "I miss Dad". The kid was fucked up. Age 15 is a mindfuck all the way around. Takes a lot of attention to get a kid through it in one piece. He wasn't getting his, he found a real bad way to get more.
If you want to find somebody to blame, look at their lifestyle and what necessitated it. Gotta have the stuff, gotta work hard to get it, no time to hang with family except in front of the TV.
Lots of sad stuff happens. It's sad. Can't pass a law that prevents anything sad from happening. Well, you could, but it wouldn't.
The thing that gets me isn't this one kid, there have been kids doing bizarre shit since forever, it's the trend: more kids doing bizarre shit, and the shit is more bizarre. There are reasons but folks are too comfortable to concern themselves with 'em.
I can cry my eyes out every time I hear about something fucked-up happening to people, or I can say "shit happens" and concentrate on keeping it from happening around me. I choose door #2, consider me an insensitive bastard but a guy can only take so much sad for so long.
btw, your blog software has some problems, it likes to bitch "the text is wrong" on send but gives no error messages on preview, that's hosed.