Recently, a 15-year-old kid murdered five members of his own family. He tried to blame it on his brother, saying he killed four then turned the gun on himself, only one of his sisters played dead and knew the truth, informing police of what really happened.
It’s a horrific situation, to say the least. What breaks inside of someone that they’d do something like that?
That, coupled with the Apalachee High School shooting, has provided fertile ground for Chinese state-run media to pretend this is a common thing.
Teenagers’ access to guns in the U.S. has come under the spotlight again after a 15-year-old boy recently shot five of his family members in the state of Washington.
The teenager has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder in connection with the rampage on October 21, where his parents and three of his siblings, aged 7, 9 and 13, were found dead when deputies arrived, USA Today reported.
Authorities say the teenager used his father’s gun that was stored in a lockbox. The suspected shooter was the only child to know the code to the lockbox, USA Today reported, citing the court filings. The next court date has been set for January 8.
Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., according to a report released in September by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, and authorities have prosecuted parents for giving access to weapons in recent cases.
Of course, we’ve debunked this claim before. It includes legal adults as “children” while omitting kids under the age of one, thus skewing the numbers significantly.
Further, the media has reported about the teen having the code to the lockbox the gun was stored in, but no one seems to be talking about how he had it. Was it given to him or did he watch someone open it and learn it that way? At this point, I don’t know and I seriously doubt CGTN–an English-language channel on Chinese state-run television–knows either.
Then, of course, we have this bit:
About 40 percent of young Americans said they have at least “somewhat easy” access to a gun, with 21 percent reporting “very easy” access to a gun. In addition, nearly 17 percent of youth report that they plan to have access to a firearm in the future, according to a report released in July 2023 by Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization which advocates for gun control and against gun violence.
Now, leaving aside that it’s funny how a gun control organization keeps doing research that just happens to conform to what they’ve been pushing for, this information doesn’t actually tell anyone anything.
For one thing, how many of these kids are right?
This survey takes a look at their perceptions, but not the reality. There were times growing up when I thought I had easy access to things that, in hindsight, I didn’t. For example, growing up in the 80s and early 90s, we’d long been told that we had easy access to drugs. If you’d asked me if I did, I’d have probably answered that yeah, I probably did.
But now, I know that no, I really didn’t. I didn’t know who sold drugs at any of my schools, had no way to pay for drugs or anything. The theory might be sound, that every teenager during that time had “somewhat easy” access to drugs, but if so, a lot of us didn’t really know where to look.
Likewise, how many of these kids who say they have this access really do?
And for those who do, what do they mean by it? How many have easy access to lawfully owned guns and how many know the neighborhood black market dealer?
But looking a nuance isn’t something the Chinese state-run media likes to look at, nor would our domestic anti-gun media. They’d rather gaslight us into believing things are worse than they are, all because they didn’t bother to report the limitations of this data.
