Baby Face Nelson shot his first victim at age 12.

Jeff Hall, a white supremacist leader in the Los Angeles area, was shot to death by his 10-year-old son on May 1. In an account of the neo-Nazi's life, the New York Times notes that Hall managed to win custody of the children from his ex-wife.

http://www.slate.com/id/2293768/

This is a fascinating story to me. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/02/neo-nazi-leader-jeff-hall-shot_n_856660.html

There are a number of reports concerning this patricide throughout the web.

The ten-year-old who shot his fascist father.

A tragedy of the first order that will no doubt show up on the cinema or at least as a cloaked episode of some crime series.

The fascist wins custody of his kids. I would give anything to interview the mother. The transcripts of the proceedings would make an interesting read.

And what do we do about this?

Should we prosecute the boy as an adult?

Each year about 200,000 defendants under 18 are sent directly or transferred to the adult system, known as criminal court, according to rough estimates.

...In Michigan, a baby-faced sixth grader, Nathaniel Abraham, shot and killed a stranger who was leaving a convenience store. When he was arrested in his classroom, his face was painted for Halloween.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-01-tryingkids_N.htm

Just as an aside I came across this line in the same article:

Meanwhile, the prosecutor buses in at-risk kids — ages 9 to 11 — so they can talk with a few teen inmates, seeing them in cuffs and chains, cut off from their families.

This was one 'solution' to these babies who are caught in criminal behavior that does not involve murder I suppose.

The article lists 2007 legislation (or proposed legislation) in several states and actually reports that some states were sending juveniles to prison as a cost cutting measure.

Americans love tragedies; they just insist upon happy endings to those tragedies. Ha

There is no happy ending here.

I found this introduction to a '98 essay:

Should child criminals be tried in courts of law as adults? A twelve-year-old Michigan boy, Nathaniel Abraham, will soon become the youngest child ever to be tried as an adult for murder in the United States. Psychiatrists say this short and frail boy functions at the level of a six-year-old, but could receive the same sentence for murder as an adult. Young Nathaniel is not alone. In the last twenty years, more than 150 children have been sentenced to death in the United States. Each year there are over 750,000 delinquency cases that go before judges in the United States. Tens of thousands of these children are tried as adults. (White)

http://www.come-over.to/fasstar/juvcrime1.htm

So we are presented with a scenereo of an individual with the mental competency of a six year old being tried as an adult!

This same essay notes that more and more states had been setting 14 years of age as some sort of cut off date for adult prosecution of juveniles.

Florida is one of the meanest states sentencing 12 & 13 year-olds to prison for decades at a time.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/flor-a03.shtml

I am not judging here; I mean when you shoot and kill your seventh grade teacher on the last day of school what am I supposed to do with you?

CNN noted this tragedy last year:

On a chilly morning in February 2009, state police found 26-year-old Kenzie Houk in her bed with a bullet though her head. She was eight months pregnant.

The search for her killer ended with the most surprising murder suspect residents of Wampum, Pennsylvania, had ever seen: 11-year-old Jordan Brown, the son of the victim's fiancé.

He is one of the youngest suspects in the country to be charged with homicide, legal experts say. There are two counts of homicide, one covering the fetus

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-02-10/justice/pennsylvania.young.murder.defendant_1_juvenile-homicide-jordan-s-attorneys?_s=PM:CRIME

The combinations and permutations of different factors relating to juvenile gun play are being played out every day in this country; this land of the free and home of the free gun play.

A jury Thursday convicted an Oklahoma City pharmacist of first-degree murder, saying he went too far when he pumped six bullets into a teenager who tried to rob the drug store where he worked, and suggested he spend the rest of his life in prison.

Jerome Ersland, 59, had been hailed as a hero for protecting two co-workers during the May 19, 2009, robbery attempt at the Reliable Discount Pharmacy in a crime-ridden neighborhood in south Oklahoma City.

A prosecutor, however, said that after Ersland shot Antwun Parker in the head, knocking the 16-year-old to the ground, Ersland made himself "judge, jury, executioner" by getting a second handgun and shooting the boy five times in the abdomen. A coroner's report said the latter shots killed Parker

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110527/ap_on_re_us/us_pharmacy_shooting

This story really bothers me. The problem is that I have not read the transcript of this trial. I cannot believe that the defense attorney did not make several mistakes in the presentation of the defense case.

How competent can you be after some wild drug addicted teenager comes into your shop waving a gun.

In the old days I stayed at an apartment one block from a liquor store and I swear there was a cop car present every morning investigating the latest mayhem committed at that establishment. So I assume the new focus of crazy felonies has to be the local drug store.

I can understand a conviction for manslaughter but damn—first degree murder? I don't care if the bastard emptied two clips into felon.

But like I say, I have not read the transcript.

The last anecdote I present concerns the duty of the police in facing juvenile gun play!

A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder after a Chicago police officer fatally shot his 15-year-old friend Wednesday on the South Side.

Brandon Ross and his friend Tatioun Williams allegedly robbed a man at gunpoint in the 7000 block of South Cregier Avenue Wednesday evening, and were confronted by police officers a short time later, the Chicago Tribune reports.

When the officers told the teens to stop, Williams, who was holding the gun, allegedly turned in the officer's direction, Fox Chicago reports. Fearing for her life, the officer shot the 15-year-old, killing him.

"They could have taken him to jail, they could have done anything but taken his life," Williams' mother told the Tribune Thursday.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/27/brandon-ross-charged-with_n_868289.html

Police are forced to clean up our garbage.

It is the citizenry that has made the weapons of mass destruction available to our children.

If my buddies might have had to face machine gun fire in Vietnam, they had to fire back even if the enemy was a 14 year old soldier.

What is a police officer to do under the same circumstances?

I have no answers here.

I was just struck by Doc Cleveland's post on Loughner.

I know we have lost the gun argument in this country to the NRA, but I still become enraged when I hear some gun toters speak. I caught this interview between Piers Morgan and that damn Nugent:

MORGAN: You write this down. Eighty people a day die in America from gunshots.

NUGENT: And 75 of them to 78 of them -- statistics by the Uniform Crime Report by the FBI and the U.N. study on violent crime -- 78 of those 80 are let out of their cages by corrupt judges and prosecutors who know the recidivism is out of control, know that they'll commit the crimes again, and they let them walk through plea bargaining, early release, and programs.

MORGAN: [unintelligible]

NUGENT: Kiss my ass. Where you have the most armed citizens in America, you have the lowest violent crime rate. Where you have the worst gun control, you have the highest crime rate.

At Andrew Breitbart's BigHollywood website AWR Hawkins suggested Nugent stuck to "fact-based arguments,"  but a quick look at the facts show that both Nugent's statements are wrong.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201105260028