“The mother of a 6-year-old Virginia boy who shot and wounded his teacher had a series of miscarriages and post-partum depression in the year before the shooting, her attorney said Friday,” adding his client “believed her gun, which was legally purchased, was secured” (see story here), which it obviously wasn’t.
There are times when the law considers mitigating circumstances, but this shouldn’t be one of them.
The Second Amendment doesn’t make anyone keep a gun in their home. That’s a choice. A gun is inherently dangerous, and requires extra care and attention, to prevent accidents and keep it out of the wrong hands.
In this case, the “wrong hands” were a child known to have severe behavior issues. That made keeping a gun in her home extra-dangerous. Given this circumstance, a strict, no-excuses expectation of extra-careful attention was called for. If she wasn’t capable of that because of the distractions in her life, and in retrospect she wasn’t, she had no business having a gun in her home.
But she chose to anyway, despite the great danger of the gun being obtained by her violent son. Which it was. The law shouldn’t, can’t, look the other way at this degree of recklessness.
The preferred solution to America’s epidemic of random and intentional gun violence is to drastically reduce the number of guns, remove military-grade weapons from civilian society, enact stricter gun regulation, and toughen law enforcement against illegal and misuse of guns.
Given the unthinking resistance to that by Republican politicians and rightwing judges, we should be doing everything we can do within the constraints imposed by politics and unfavorable judicial rulings to restrain irresponsible gun owners like this mother. They’re among the last people in our criminal justice system who should be granted reduced accountability based on “mitigating circumstances.” The danger they pose to their innocent fellow citizens is simply too great to cut them any slack.