Where were the parents?

They probably didn’t know.

At a nearby Trump rally, no doubt.

I’m wondering if the guns were owned by the parents and left unlocked.

Parents can’t be everywhere at once.
Parents have their own lives.
Parents are probably driven to insanity by even raising kids and will mentally check out.

And 1000 other reasons in this swirling mass of randomness.

Well they’ll be held responsible if the gun belonged to them.

^To me. The fact that there were at least two juvies, usually means that it wasn’t an isolated incident of parental neglect.
It’s tempting for media to jump at “gang” activity.
However. Our country’s youth carry guns, in much higher numbers than ever.
To me. It is as generational, as regional.
Police searches of people, based on the odor of Marijuana, have contributed greatly to young men ending up in jail.
Stats were very disappointing.
Some crazy numbers, like over 80% of young black males searched over the smell of weed, were also found with firearms.
Obviously, whites and other races too.
To some younger people, Glocks with switches, are a status symbol. The poor kids put pictures/videos of themselves with firearms and violent bragging online. So. Other kids want to be like them. It’s quite cyclical.

I occasionally carry. NEVER, at places where there are lots of people. We can argue until the cows come home, but it’s hard to fathom that this would not have occurred without the presence of firearms in a public place.
So many idiots are emboldened, by firearms. They seek conflict.
Death by firearms, is the number one cause of death for (I think 15–25 year-old) young black men in America.
I see occasional incidents where people can go from road rage, to homicide. Admittedly. I will fight someone on the side of the road.
Dumb as that is, is dumber now.
People are afraid to get their ass kicked. They’d rather shoot.

Regardless of the reasons for this shooting, we are right back in the same department. Shaking our heads, holding our hearts.

What I’ve seen from this event is pretty sketchy. TMZ posted some good video and a decent explanation of what happened to lead to all the chaos. Because it wasn’t like they stormed in, acting like maniacs, nothing would really draw attention to them or what was going on before the shooting. And then it was too late to see much of what led up to it. It looks like there were several juvies that were all together. At least one of them began arguing with someone that was only described as a taller person, probably a man. Seemed to be someone who was older than these kids. Not sure. Eyewitnesses apparently finger this guy as the one that fired the first shot. No definitive answers on who else shot or anything.

As for where the parents were? My guess is that the parents had no clue the kids had guns. The kids all look to be late teens so it is almost certain they weren’t going to be hanging with the parents. I know at that age I didn’t want to hang with the parents at events like this. Nobody I knew at the time that age wanted to hang with their parents. It’s the age of boys trying to be come men. They are looking for independence and a sense of growing up. Unfortunately this is also the age of hormones and thrill-seeking. In most families, parents have very little input into the lives of boys this age. If they haven’t instilled morals, responsibility and accountability by this point, it is basically too late.

Whatever answer everyone comes up with, a young innocent woman is dead. Juveniles are handed longer sentences for their crimes now. They are not just given a slap on the wrist. So these juveniles will most likely serve considerable time in prison.

@YARNLADY It’s not just the parents. It is a crime to discipline children now and they often don’t fully understand consequences until it is taken to this extreme.

Also a reminder that the other half of gun deaths (one side being young black men) is middle aged white men committing suicide.

So it’s a problem that affects everyone and the parents aren’t to blame.

I blame the rich, and we all know why.

If a parent has a gun and it’s accessible to the kids then it IS the parent’s fault @Blackberry.

@Blackwater_Park There is no place on Earth where disciplining a child is a crime. And even if you have an extremely narrow conception of discipline such that only corporal punishment counts, that is legal for parents to do in all 50 states. It’s also legal for public schools to engage in corporal punishment in 17 states, including Missouri (where this took place).

I work with children and am a mandatory reporter, which means I have to call CPS at the merest whiff of abuse. Never once has one of my reports regarding physical violence led to criminal charges. In fact, only once has it gone further than the person on the other side of the phone telling me “that’s considered within the bounds of normal disciplinary behavior.”

Well, we can all speculate, but teens shooting at each other often involves some kind of gang activity, kids like that often grow up in homes without fathers and with mothers who are at work for much of the day, and parental engagement and influence is lower than average. There’s a certain common narrative here. Since they’re juveniles, there’s not much information about them out there, so I don’t know for sure in this case, but knowing some cases of teenagers shooting at each other around here, those were usually the typical circumstances (I knew a 17-year-old who was killed in crossfire between other teenagers, and yes, it was gang-related).

@Zounderkite I worked in Child Abuse (in the Dept itself, which didn’t have that name but I use that name because otherwise I need to explain what I did) as a caseworker and I can assure you that there are limits to the corporal punishment (i.e. leaving a bruise or other mark, using a spoon, shoe, belt, switch, etc.), just some examples. Kids are removed and remanded to Foster Care every day for that stuff, even from the most affluent of areas.

The County I worked in is one of the most affluent in the country, but there are, in that County, urban areas and cities. The abuse and neglect came from all income levels.

@jca2 I know that there are limits. We had a child removed from her foster family last year due to sexual abuse (which is more common in my area than physical abuse). What I gave was a personal anecdote to demonstrate that @Blackwater_Park‘s claim was wildly exaggerated (which someone messaged me saying is a pattern for him).

Come on Jellies. Don’t dis on others here.

@Zounderkite Children are not disciplined as they once were. If a kid gets paddled at school, the administration may very likely get sued. Most teachers I know are over the bad behavior in their classrooms they no longer have control over. When I say it’s a crime I’m mainly being facetious, but we all know things are different now. That said, if someone wants to bring up an example of me wildly exaggerating something else… bring it out right here. I’m listening. Any other example, really.

If a kid gets paddled at school, the administration may very likely get sued.

As they should be!

Abuse begets abuse. Abuse is morally, ethically, and legally wrong, period, by parents, and especially by someone not even related to the victim….yes, victim.

Fortunately, corporal punishment is not allowed in schools in New York state, and is considered child abuse: https://www.nysed.gov/student-support-services/corporal-punishment

About 20 states still allow school staff to hit children. When I lived in Tennessee the schools that did use corporal punishment had a parent sign off at the beginning of the year that it’s ok to hit the kid. Some schools in the area stopped using corporal punishment, and some parents felt that was a problem. I just couldn’t believe it was still happening in schools.

One news story while I lived there, a very very young child had to go to the hospital the welts on his bottom were so bad.

@JLeslie I wonder, in the states where it’s legal, if they do it in front of the other kids. They might think of it as a deterrent to whip kids in front of other kids, and it might be, but it also is traumatizing for both the victim and the other kids and is also embarassing for the kid getting whipped or other punishment.

@jca2 That’s exactly what they did when I was in primary school. It worked too. I don’t think there is a place for it in 2024 though.

Or maybe they were beaten too much. Hitler received a lot of corporal punishment from his father.

@Blackwater_Park I have friends and family who are in their 60s and 70s who went to Catholic schools in NY and they tell me stories about the nuns and the Catholic brothers who really beat students, almost in a sadistic fashion, for minor infractions. This would have been in the 50s and 60s.

@jca2 I have heard those stories too. In my time ~1990, kids still got paddled but it was rare and reserved as a last resort for those who were being disrespectful and disruptive during class. They would call the gym teacher, pull the kid just out of view from the classroom, give him a couple of taps (that we all heard), and send him back into the classroom. The paddling was not the punishment, it was the walk of shame back to their seat.

I read an article that stated that there is a lot of gun violence in Kansas City and the Sheriff is frustrated because Missouri passed a law some years ago stating that no local municipality can pass its own gun control laws.

is kansas city not in kansas?

@ragingloli Kansas City is in Missouri.

madness!

@ragingloli and Arkansas is pronounced -saw instead of -sas. Go figure.

When a friend of ours told us they used corporal punishment in the school she formerly taught at in Mississippi, I replied, “I didn’t realize you taught at a private school.” She told me she had worked at a public school, and that’s when I learned some public schools in 2008 still used corporal punishment. I was shocked. When I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s the corporal punishment stories were about the Catholic schools where I lived.

In the Bible Belt there is such a prevalence of people thinking that hitting children is good for the kid, public schools and politics are still influenced by that thinking. The bible belt is mostly Evangelical Protestant Christians. The states that are heavily Catholic in the north part of the US actually have laws against corporal punishment in public schools.

I just googled to see if laws have changed in the last ten years, and I found this map showing some states make it illegal in both private and public schools. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_the_United_States#:~:text=Corporal%20punishment%20is%20still%20used,was%20Idaho%20in%20July%202023.

Back to the original post, have any jellies heard anything about how the shooters had access to the guns that were used in the shooting? Were the guns owned by the parents?

Thanks for that article, @JLeslie. In 2014, a student was struck in a U.S. public school an average of once every 30 seconds.[6] SMH

@smudges I noticed Florida is one of the states it’s allowed, but in the over 20 years that I’ve lived all over the peninsula of Florida I have never heard anyone mention corporal punishment in schools; not in real life conversation or with Florida facebook friends, or in news articles for that matter. I wonder how prevalent it actually is in Florida? Maybe up in the panhandle they utilize it. When I lived in Tennessee the topic came up several times, and it was usually parents wanting it in school or a news article about a severe hit.

@raggie… KC is in Kansas AND Missouri. It sprawled.

@ragingloli From Worldatlas.com:

There has always been confusion as to where the Kansas City is located depending on the Kansas City one is referring to. There are two Kansas Cities in the United States; Kansas City in the state of Missouri and Kansas City in the state of Kansas. There have been controversies concerning the naming of the two cities. Most of the city area is in Missouri, and this is why the Kansas City in Missouri is more popular than the Kansas City in Kansas. It should not be mistaken that the Kansas City in Missouri straddles the borders into the next state. These are two different cities sharing the same border. The Kansas City metropolitan area is the one that straddles the Kansas-Missouri borders.

^^ I’m reading the above and it sounds like word salad to me. First it says there are two different cities which is true. Then it says that Kansas City, MO which is the larger does not straddle the border. And then the last sentence contradicts that, unless they are talking about the Kansas Kansas City? It is very poorly written.

@janbb Agreed.

This is cut and pasted from Wikipedia (Kansas City Missouri). I don’t have time to delete the irrelevant parts now, as I’m getting ready to go out.

Kansas City, Missouri (KC or KCMO) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri by population and area. Most of the city lies within Jackson County, with portions spilling into Clay, Platte, and Cass counties. It is the central city of the Kansas City metropolitan area, which straddles the Missouri–Kansas state line and has a population of 2,392,035.[7][8][9][2] As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090,[10] making it the 37th most-populous city in the United States, as well as the sixth-most populous city in the Midwest.[11] Kansas City was founded in the 1830s as a port on the Missouri River at its confluence with the Kansas River from the west. On June 1, 1850, the town of Kansas was incorporated; shortly after came the establishment of the Kansas Territory. Confusion between the two ensued, and the name Kansas City was assigned to distinguish them soon after.

Sitting on Missouri’s western boundary with Kansas, with Downtown near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the city encompasses about 319.03 square miles (826.3 km2), making it the 25th largest city by total area in the United States. It serves as one of the two county seats of Jackson County, along with the major satellite city of Independence. Other major suburbs include the Missouri cities of Blue Springs and Lee’s Summit and the Kansas cities of Overland Park, Olathe, Lenexa, and Kansas City, Kansas.

Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO are two separate cities with separate governments and boundaries. The two cities abut against each other along the state line, but they do not cross into the other state. The metro area, including the two Kansas Cities, overlaps the two states, just as the St. Louis metro overlaps Missouri/Illinois (there’s an old joke about Missouri’s two largest cities trying to escape the state). Kansas City, MO is the larger of the two and is home to the major league sports teams.

(I had to drunkenly explain this to my friend at a Super Bowl party. In either case, these kids shooting at each other didn’t do so because of school spanking laws, get a grip, people).

There is a road called State Line Rd in Kansas City. Guess where it runs.

It’s one big mess. Been there many times. People try to stay off roads and just drive through adjoining parking lots to get from A to B.
The Power and Light District is way cool. Party Central.
I still say it’s one, big, mess that started as the destination for many, many cattle drives and it just expanded.
It makes sense that when it encroached into Missouri it became another town, subject to the laws of Missouri.
But there is no clear delineation between KCMO and KCK aside from an obscure roadsign.

When my family moved back to the US, from Germany, I was almost 8 years old.
The difference between the schools in Germany, and the American South were vast.

The older black kids had this thing, where they’d turn the lights off in the bathroom and gang individual white kids.

I was literally peeing when the lights went out, and then I got hot multiple times in the face.
They were so much older/bigger, better than me. I fought back, but mainly just got my little ass kicked.
I didn’t even know those kids. They were all like 12–13 years old and like I said, I was 7.
They broke my nose, and I had a LOT of blood that soaked my whole front of my shirt.
The other kids, were not hurt by my pathetic defense.

The principal spoke with my attackers, then paddled them. It was fairly violent. Then the kids left, and I was brought in. The principal explained that fighting was not tolerated, and I was to be paddled.
There was a small painting of a duck pond, on the principal’s desk. He told me “bend over, and look at the ducks.” And then he beat my ass with a fucking big wooden paddle.
As I starred at the ducks, I was getting my ass beat, while my nose bled on his desk.

My mother couldn’t get out of work, to get me. So I had to take the bus. Friends of the kids who attacked me beat me up again on the bus.
I was late getting home, as a result. I was in trouble for being late, and “fighting.”

My nose healed. But I still got beat up, or bullied almost every day the rest of that year.
The teachers witnessed all sorts of violence. Some were scared to get involved, but most were complicit.
Thanks public school.
Thanks America.

Fro a General question, this has certainly gone off-topic, including my comment. Sorry @YARNLADY !

^Agreed. My bad too. I guess it wasn’t moded, so I just went with it…

Two adults got in an argument and pulled guns, both charged. Two juveniles (teens) were charged with gun-related charges and resisting.
Guns, anywhere in Missouri, are easily obtained cheap, especially in urban areas.

When are we gonna get our shit together?

@Dutchess_III Never. Two adults should have been able to disagree without a bystander dying. I’m interested in the details but they arwn’t telling specifics yet.

^^Thanks for that update.