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Just before Covid, a gun store was robbed in my town. I worked in a different gun store, so we got some of the inside scoop. Proprietor of the robbed store used to work on my computer whenever I fucked it up too badly. The shop was the shittiest one in the county, lodged in a former meat market. The robbers just pulled part of the roof off the building to get into the secure room.
Turned out to be the local high school football team. They stole around fifty guns, fifteen of which have been recovered some seven years later. The recovered guns have been used in at least three homicides so far. One was just recovered at a traffic stop this year, one killed a high school senior just after prom not two weeks ago. Perp there hasn't been identified or caught.
The kids who robbed the place were caught within days. It remains unclear exactly how many people were involved, at least two unnamed juveniles were processed, but shield laws prevent the public knowing anything. Three of the older kids were charged for the robbery, one got no time, other two got three and ten months respectively, despite not cooperating with police in the recovery of the firearms or identification of other perpetrators. Everyone involved was put into a youth criminal diversion program that released them without a criminal record.
The ringleader and one who got the most time, one Travontis (Drink!) Miller, was given the ten month sentence, but due to the protective nature of the diversion program, it will never be public knowledge that he plead guilty to multiple firearm felonies or how long he actually served of that jail term. What we do know is that he was out prior to December of 2021, because that's when he was arrested for a series of other crimes we're not entirely sure what happened.
He was charged with assault and battery (strangulation), robbery and domestic violence, but once again was given protected youth status despite being in his twenties by this point (the program runs until age 24). He also picked up charges of resisting arrest and being in possession of one of the stolen firearms from the original gun store case. These charges too were concealed under the diversion program.
So when people tell me that what we really need to cut down on gun violence in this country is to ensure that every state has a different magazine limit, or force used gun sales into stores, or ban AR-15s, or not allow gun companies to advertise, it makes me irrationally angry. This dude, when he hits 25, will have no criminal record and will be able to pass a background check to buy a firearm legally. At least until his next felony, which I don't expect to take long.
Below are two quote sets for those who didn't read the articles, first the prosecution in the original case:
The judge wasn't interested, and had The Science on his side.
But sure, the problem with gun violence in the US is that Billy Bob put a giggle trigger on his PSA.
Edit: added/fixed links
Just a very friendly ping to @netstack to ask him to take special note of this part from this post:
Our previous conversation discussing it
Huh. I’d forgotten all about that.
I maintain that I’ve never seen a zoomer use that reasoning as an excuse. 20somethings who are trying to prolong their childhood rarely act self-aware. I recognize that both you and @ThisIsSin have seen it happen. No idea what kind of filter bubble could separate us on that.
Well, I know (or rather, knew, they're older now) teenagers, and in particular whose parents tend to be pretty intelligent though on the old side- so they benefit/suffer from the same late-Boomer social/parenting patterns with which I am familiar. This filter bubble was honestly just luck [and to a degree did indeed provide a sort of second teenager-hood; it's uncanny the second time around].
It's partly cultural compression; I don't find circumstances growing up now to be particularly different from that which were present in my time, but that's also because most of the sabotage to the cultural push/rewards of growing up was already done before I got there, so there wasn't much left to take away. (This was mostly something that happened in the '80s, as I understand it.)
It's more just the room temperature and the 'artificially zero expectations during critical period' that does most of the damage resulting in these guys just acting slightly off, like they're invisibly handcuffed to something. "You shouldn't try because you're undeveloped" combined with teenagers being smart or agreeable enough to take that advice seriously is destructive (and can evoke certain Uncle Ruckus-like behaviors with respect to each other too). I think most adults tend to take for granted some in-built biological resistance to that meme because "well, if someone told me that I would have just done it anyway out of spite" but I'm not so sure. It's that kid who clicks "no" to the site banner that asks them if they're 18 yet, where honesty and conscientiousness become vices.
Some of them are even self-aware enough to wonder where the opportunity for them to create the stories their parents always tell is, or when it's going to show up. It's very strange and to be honest quite depressing that [society in general] still suffers from this problem, and I don't know (but think very often, perhaps too much) about how to break it (and trying to identify where to settle, in a place that maximally permits this sort of thing, is one of the things I tell myself delays family formation on my end).
Self-awareness is really rare anyway; those who have it but would rather spend time Motteposting rarer still.
I noticed a good chunk of this effect in my 10s (perhaps I might say I was radicalized from an early age). The distractions that were thrown my way proved effective enough though (plus, even though I underrate this, I got a chance to work in places that are either illegal [now] or highly unusual- I didn't just do nothing, even though it feels like it a lot of the time), but a lot of time I'm recalling things I specifically promised myself at the time I'd remember (and commit to not doing in the future). Emotional states reacting to certain things, etc.
I'm well past 20something at this point, but for a couple of reasons won't clock (to even said aformentioned teenagers) as someone who's doing this. Part of that is that I'm just as meme-poisoned, I guess (I skip a certain piece of modern slang, but I also skipped modern slang back when I was an actual teenager, so...), but I think the bigger part of it is that I actually kind of like teenagers (or the stereotypical attitude they have more generally), and maybe the relative lack of awkwardness does most of the passing (or rather, I'm just as awkward around these guys as I am around everyone else, which is especially apparent whenever I interact with someone younger than that). But, who can say.
But then I never grew up in an area where the average 10-something was particularly stupid/irresponsible (i.e. exceeding expectations), went to what you'd call a charter school, and grew up in the (equivalent of the) Purple part of a Blue state. So the concept that the young are actually more thoughtful [and risk-averse] once out of adult earshot is pretty natural to me (and experience bears that out); whether that's simply caused by the assumption that they wouldn't be, I don't know.
It's also more widespread than that; more generally, I've noticed interactions (just walking around in public) where the kid notices something before the parent does (usually a car, or someone taking a photo), and the kid's already corrected the problem before the adult can tell them to. And I think that some of that's just caused by inherently having experienced them at their worst and most helpless, but I think a lot of it is either just not paying attention, or not having the time/context/energy to know when to pay attention to the fact they're going to automatically do it. Maybe "being told to do something I was already doing" is just uniquely annoying to me, but I don't think it is.
I think some of the problem is that we don't teach people how to lead properly, and now that there's less organic opportunity (both to make mistakes, and the mistakes made are costlier now) the people who did learn it organically are now failing to compensate for the fact you seem to have to intentionally encourage that development now. Because the teenage rebellion meme isn't strong enough and won't help the people who weren't going to do it anyway.
(And the people who don't aren't necessarily doing it on purpose, since there's the power angle to consider, and the biology angle, and the cost angle, and the "they're turning into someone you hate" angle, and the "I spent 13 years raising this kid why aren't my old strategies working please help me" angle... tend to frustrate the powers of observation -> ability to compensate for this in people I believe have those powers.)
It's kind of the definition of a wicked problem.
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