Eight Year Old Possibly Tried As An Adult.

Police officers in a small town in Arizona are pushing to put an eight-year-old boy on trial as an adult for the premeditated murder of his father and a family friend.

The boy has confessed to shooting at close range his father, Vincent Romero, 29, and Timothy Romans, 39, who was renting a room in their house in St Johns. The boy is alleged to have shot both men with a .22 calibre rifle last Wednesday, one on the front step, the other in an upstairs room. He then walked to a neighbour's house and announced that he believed his father was dead.

Officers allege that the shootings were planned. They are investigating whether there was any abuse that could have led to the incident.

"He's just eight years old. He just doesn't decide one day that he's going to shoot his father and his father's friend for no reason. Something led up to this," the local police chief Roy Melnick told the Associated Press.

Romero was an avid hunter who taught his son how to use rifles to shoot prairie dogs. He was buried yesterday wearing his hunter's cap. The boy's stepmother, who married Romero in September, had suggested he have his own gun.

The Catholic priest who conducted the funeral said Romero had come to him before the shooting to ask his advice about whether his son should be allowed to handle guns. "That child, I don't think he knows what he did, and it was brutal," Rev John Paul Sauter said.

The boy has no history of any violence or irregular behaviour. His lawyer, Benjamin Brewer, said "He's trying to be tough, but he's scared."

The killings have shocked the town of 4,000 people that lies 170 miles north-east of Arizona's capitol, Phoenix. St Johns mayor, Ross Overson, said the incident "makes us ask 'Why?' No community can understand how something like this could happen."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

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Notice how the default answer is to "get tough on criminals." Yup just strap that felon on the gurney and administer the "humane" lethal injection. That will serve as a warning to all those other hard core criminals. No need to wonder how this child went so completely off the rails. No need to wonder how a small town community, part of "Real America" managed to miss the warning signs. Police are only now investigating the possibility of abuse.

Good idea Police chief Roy Melnick, look into that, investigate the possibility of child neglect / child abuse. While your at it; how about not jumping to conclusions until all the fact are in?. How about not speculating about how the case should be tried, or if it should be tried at all? How about figuring out what drove a eight year old child to plan and complete the homicide of two adults? How about doing, you know, police work?

Knoxville and the US Gun Culture.

There is a sense of world weary cynicism that envelopes the news coming out of Knoxville. We have been here before, a demented angry individual creates havoc and tragedy in a small corner of the United States, and we all go through a form of Kabuki theater.

The second Amendment types will roll out the argument that this proves even more people need to have guns. Never mind that statically speaking the only people not packing in the US are toddlers and newborns. There is almost one gun for every person living in the USA. Again, statistically speaking there is one firearm for every adult in America. There are roughly 200,000,000 million firearms in circulation for over 300,000,000 citizens. With only roughly a quarter of the population being gun owners, most of them own multiple fire arms. Seventy Five percent of gun owners own one or more firearms. Firearms are just like Lay’s potato chips you can’t seem to have just one. The issue is not owning the weapons, it is the owners themselves. The NRA types have never given a rational plan for preventing firearms getting into the hands of bad actors. They continue to post the idea that individual citizens go back to the glory days of Deadwood and Tombstone were all adults were running around with six-shooters. They seem to forget that Federal Authority had to step in to those towns and reestablish law and order.

The central myth here is of privatization. It is assumed that individual private citizens can best provide their own protection. It has been tried; the idea has always degenerated into the lynch mob and rampant lawlessness. We have police forces because collective security has always ended up being the better way to go. Unfortunately that means submitting to the bug-bear of the conservative movement- Government. Conservatives hate Government; they hate the commons. Most of all they hate the idea of “We”; as in We the people. They support them selves and no one else. Cut though the rhetoric and what you here at its core is “Me.”

This is not to say that individual do not have a fundamental right to protect themselves and their loved ones. It is to say that such protection is best done as a shared responsibility. It is to say a community has the right to set standards of gun ownership. At the very least a community has the right to bar firearms ownership to mentally unstable individuals and others who present a clear and present danger to that community.

Unfortunately we as a culture are stuck in a John Wayne movie. We are still carrying the myth of the cowboy in our collective head. We forget that in the old west most shootings were done by ambush. Most cowboys got shot in the back or otherwise surprised. The shoot out at the O.K. Corral was atypical, Wild Bill Hickok’s end was a much more normal occurrence. The Old West gun culture ultimately failed because allowing each man to be a law unto himself did not work. It is passing strange that we have failed to learn that particular piece of history. But then we do seem to prefer myth to reality; we voted for Ronald Regan- Twice.