The six-year-old student who shot his teacher in the US earlier this year, boasted about the incident saying “I shot [her] dead”, unsealed court documents show.
While being restrained after the shooting at a Virginia school, the boy is said to have admitted “I did it”, adding “I got my mom’s gun last night”.
His teacher, Abigail “Abby” Zwerner - who survived - filed a $40m (£31.4m) lawsuit earlier this year.
The boy has not been charged.
The boy’s mother, however, Deja Taylor, has been charged with felony child neglect and misdemeanour recklessly leaving a loaded firearm as to endanger a child.
In Ms Zwerner’s lawsuit, filed in April, she accuses school officials of gross negligence for ignoring warning signs and argues the defendants knew the child "had a history of random violence
The documents also mention another incident with the same student while he was in kindergarten. A retired teacher told police he started “choking her to the point she could not breathe”.
Bruh, I’m just appealing to utilitarianism here. Also, remember that this child almost murdered an innocent teacher.
Approx. 20.000 juveniles were arrested for murder or attempted murder in 2020 (per the US Dept of Justice) Shall we put them all down, as you say? Just to be safe?
Calling your position utilitarianism is interesting, in what way is really, actually murdering a child (never mind the massive amount of legal, ethical and emotional complications that entail) to prevent a hypothetical future murder maximizing utility for anyone?
No, of course we shouldn’t put them all down. But extreme cases like this ought to be considered carefully, and if the risk is high, we should remove these individuals from society.
To your second point, this child already almost killed someone and then bragged about it, showing no remorse. There is a very good chance he will grow up to try and commit murder again; he’s too far gone. That’s where the utility maximisation comes in.
And re: your point about there being a great deal of legal, ethical, and emotional complications for this kind of policy intervention, I completely agree. Good thing we’re just talking shit on Lemmy, right? 😂
What brain-dead form of utilitarianism is that supposed to be? The “I’m-16-and-on-a-wikipedia-bender”-kind?
We don’t hold 6-year-old children accountable for very much in a legal sense, because they are essentially animals able to (barely) speak. Thats why we instead regulate gun-ownership, so that no child has access to firearms. And if that doesn’t seem to do the trick yet, I’d suggest regulating more comprehensively and holding parents accountable, so that it is very much in their own interest to keep guns from kids. We might also fund social services and schools to the extent that children are able to adequatley learn how to control their emotions and verbalise anger, unhapiness in a non-ciolent way, even if their parents are a bunch of irresponsible idiots.
That seem much preferable to executing a six year old every once in a while to be save.
That’s just utilitarianism taken to its logical conclusion, is it not? Don’t hate the player, hate the game lol.
And I agree that all of those interventions are preferable to capital punishment for juveniles. But in extreme cases where they are too far gone and are going to grow up to become killers, surely there is more we can do? Cos atm, we just let that happen and innocent people die.