The Cynic Express(ed) 1.24: On Jonesboro

     Hot off the depresses, two children in Arkansas ambushed their classmates today. After someone in the school pulled the fire alarm, the schoolchildren and their teachers marched out to a field to wait for the all clear and found a rain of lead from a wooded area nearby. The perpetrators? A boy of thirteen and a boy of eleven, clad in camies and sporting an arsenal that rivaled what my friends and I only could pretend to have when we played war. The motivation? Revenge for some slight or punishment or another, the rumors go. It really doesn't matter much, the motivation, the attention. At least four are dead, gunned down by kids, and not hardened, disenfranchised urban youths of impoverished backgrounds and a handy set of prerecorded rationalizations.

     Whereas I am a fan of personal responsibility, so much that I sometimes wrinkle my nose at the law and its current cavalcade of precedents, I have to say that the blame does not only lie with the two boys and their insider, alarm-pulling cohort, but with their parents as well. The boys who pulled the triggers get a healthy backhoe full of responsibility, for although they may not have had the requisite amount of experience dictated by law to drive, vote, or drink alcohol, they have seen enough movies to know what happens when somebody gets in front of a bullet. They are independent, although incompletely formed, agents of construction, destruction, and all other moral mayhem. They should pay for their crimes.

     Of course, although the boys are almost independent agents, their parents are also culpable. I would very much like to simply imagine them as poor white trash in some trailer park in Arkansas, sucking six-packs and living on WIC. They probably aren't. They are probably only as morally inattentive as the rest of the populace, letting their children receive their moral compass from the mainstream, LCD, media of movies and television. It would be wrong to punish parents for the ills of their grown children, or even their children that can be tried as an adult.

     Unfortunately, the parents in this case not only failed to keep a good bead on their children, but they must have left the gun cabinet unlocked. To charge the parents with crimes equal to the boys' multiple murders would certainly be unjust. And as there is currently no charge for Armed Criminal Stupidity or a felony charge for Use of a Firearm in a case of Parental Negligence, I think we can only charge them as accessories before the fact.

     But haven't they suffered enough? With the knowledge that their pride, their joy, and their best shot at a quality retirement facility is going to be in and out of the prison system for the rest of the boy's life enough? Or yet, should Arkansas become bold and put these pre-puberty snipers on trial as adults and sentence them to death, won't the mother and/or father of these lads have suffered enough?

     No. Their children were not stripped from them without warning, without provocation, on a bright spring day at the zenith of childhood. Their children took action to take lives, and they, if not for their lapse in their children's upbringings, but especially for the simple fact that they let their children have access to guns and ammunition on a school day. And, as the parents share responsibility, so let them share the experience of the court system--as accessories before the fact.