The country is still unsure about what to do when it comes to gun laws and gun control reform, but after two fifth graders were accused to plotting to kill six other students with a gun and a knife it became obvious that something needed to be done soon.
While the Second Amendment gives every American the “right to bear arms” what happens when those arms aren’t secured and suddenly children as young as 10 are able to get their hands on them?
Perhaps an even more daunting question… are parents becoming so inattentive that children are able to carry out murder plots using their mom and dad’s weapons with nobody noticing that anything is out of the ordinary?
Well that apparently was the case for the 10-year-old student at Fort Colville Elementary School in eastern Washington.
Thanks to a few children seeing the boy and his accomplice carrying a gun and a knife nobody was harmed in the plot that intended to kill six young school children.
LA Times reports:
“This was a plan. And it was a plan to kill,” Stevens County prosecuting attorney Timothy Rasmussen said Thursday.
Rasmussen said he would argue that the 10-year-old and his 11-year-old codefendant be held criminally responsible on charges of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and witness tampering — a charge filed after authorities said the boys promised to pay $80 to a student if he agreed not to tell anyone about the plot.
According to a court affidavit made public this week, the incident came to light shortly before 8 a.m. on Feb. 7, when a fourth-grader told a teacher he had seen an 11-year-old boy with a knife.
The Colville School Supt. Mike Cashion has been a high school counselor and psychologist for many years and he revealed that this situation was still perplexing and shocking to him.
The weapons found were a large knife and a .45-caliber Remington 1911 semiautomatic handgun along with an ammunition clip.
The LA Times continued:
When questioned separately shortly after the weapons were discovered, the boys admitted their plot, authorities said. “I was going to kill her with the knife and [the other boy] was supposed to use the gun to keep anyone from trying to stop me or mess up our plan,” the older boy told detectives.
When shown a class list, the boy identified six other classmates who were targeted.
So what was the motive behind the murder plot? Nothing more than the fact that the six targets were annoying to the would-be fifth grade murderers.
On Feb. 20 the boys will appear in court so the legal system can decide if the young boys were mentally capable of pulling off the murder plot.
Murder Motive Earns Cop Killer Christopher Dorner Sympathy
A manifesto posted on Facebook by Christopher Dorner has some minorities sympathizing with his murder motive, although they still agree there is no excuse to kill someone.
The 33-year-old former LA police officer asked the question, “What would you do to clear your name?” before he was killed during a showdown with officers on Tuesday.
His answer to the question was quite troubling as he explained he would have no problem resorting to violence to prove he wasn’t a liar.
According to the Huffington Post:
Dorner formally lost his job on the Los Angles police force in 2009 for filing an excessive force complaint against another officer, later deemed to be false. He includes case numbers associated with reports, other documents and a video in police custody that he claims prove that he told the truth.
With Dorner gone, four people dead and a region’s law enforcement agencies still reeling, many other questions remain unanswered. Experts contacted by The Huffington Post this week said they had no direct knowledge of Dorner, but offered comments based on the manifesto police say he wrote and media reports about his violent spree and work history at the LAPD.
While the media had no problem painting Dorner to be a cruel murderer, it seems like nobody is willing to look into the case of the woman who may have provided the motive for all the killings.
The Huffington Post explained:
Dorner claimed in his manifesto that the officer he named in his complaint was a policewoman known around town as “La Chubacabra.” (La Chupacabra is, depending on who is asked, a mythical and murderous creature with an often female face and vampire-like blood-lust, featured in the folklore of several Spanish-speaking countries.) The officer proudly claimed the sobriquet, Dorner wrote, because she enjoyed inflicting pain and drawing blood in her work.
“If I were a reporter in Los Angeles right now, I would be asking for some public records and trying to find out on the street if anyone has heard of this La Chupacabra,” Bonilla-Silva said. “I don’t see much of that happening.”
Instead, Dorner has been described alternatively as litigious, angry, race-fixated and dishonest. He was rightfully booted from the police force, Los Angeles police officials have said.
Murder is never the right answer to solve any problem, but you can’t help but wonder if Dorner was telling the truth? Was this so-called “La Chupacabra” really guilty of using excessive force and was he fired for telling the truth when everyone else remained silent?
President Hugo Chavez photographed smiling, but his health is still in question. [NY Times]
President Obama arrives in Chicago amidst rising gun violence in the city. [Chicago Tribune]
Nobody can do right by Cornel West who called President Obama, Bush, and Nixon war criminals. [Atlanta Black Star]
