Florida teen allegedly shoots, kills sister after argument over Christmas gifts
cbsnews.com
A 14-year-old boy allegedly fatally shot his older sister in Florida after a family argument over Christmas presents, officials said Tuesday.
The teen had been out shopping on Christmas Eve with Abrielle Baldwin, his 23-year-old sister, as well as his mother, 15-year-old brother and sister's children, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference.
The teenage brothers got into an argument about who was getting more Christmas presents.
"They had this family spat about who was getting what and what money was being spent on who, and they were having this big thing going on in this store," Gualtieri said.
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Ah yes, the "If it's not going to stop 100% of the problem, let's not do it at all" bullshit.
That old chestnut.
If random check stops don't stop 100% of drunk drivers, why do them at all. Your just punishing the drivers who AREN'T driving drunk!
If seatbelts don't save 100% of lives, why regulate that we wear them. Muh Freedums!!
It bullshit excuses made by people with literally nothing of any real sense to fall back on.
Not on that guy's side, but he didn't strictly say that we shouldn't have those laws.
He said that if you're siteing a case where we did have those laws and a bad thing happened as an example for why we need laws like that in place to stop the bad thing from happening, it falls a little flat.
Not that the idea of having laws like that is bad, but citing individual cases is flawed, as no amount of regulatory structure will ever prevent 100% of cases.
To frame it a different way, I could argue that there's literally no country on earth with strong enough gun laws, because there's no country with zero gun deaths. I could argue that we need random searches of people homes to try and find guns, or imprisoning people who talk about guns, because the current laws clearly aren't good enough because people are still getting shot. Doesn't matter if it was only 1 incident in the past 30yrs. Still happened, so we need stricter laws.
That's obviously an absurd level of hyperbole, and I want to reiterate that I'm all for regulation on firearms. Just wanted to point out that the core argument here is unideal.
The guy said "would have done so regardless of what laws were in place".
As in, this happened, and there are already laws, so there's no point in stronger laws or more restrictions.
That's like saying "Sure, there are hundreds of fatalities in this factory, but they already get 10c fines whenever there's an at-fault accident. The accidents would have happened regardless of the fines! There's no point in higher fines since the fines have shown they're not working!"
That's all valid, but I think you've missed my point.
While I disagree with "the laws did nothing so why have laws," I also disagree with, "the laws didn't work, so we need harsher laws." Both are flawed logically.
There is, in fact, a level of restriction that goes too far in the name of preventing crime. We could lock everyone in jail for instance, as people in cages can't commit crimes (ymmv). That's obviously a bad idea though, for many reasons.
And I'm with you. I think we need to evaluate what that right balance is. What I was pushing back on was the idea that, "if there's even one gun death ever, then the laws didn't go far enough, and we need more restrictions," which I took to be the sentiment of the OP. That lack of nuance worries me is all.
I don't know if the gun laws that were violated were good enough or not. I didn't look them up, tbh. But you can have all the laws in the world, and have them be completely useless if they aren't properly enforced. Maybe the laws are actually good, and the enforcement mechanism is flawed? Maybe both are good and this is just an unfortunate side effect of it being impossible to police everyone all the time. Or maybe the laws themselves are flawed and the OP is right that something needs changing. I don't know. But I do know that it's a big issue with a lot of nuance, and that a knee jerk reaction of "we need more laws" is unhelpful at best and detrimental at worst.
I don't know what you mean by "logically". There's no "logical" way to determine what will work. This is a matter of human nature, not logic. But, science strongly suggests that harsher laws do work when it comes to guns. Places with strong gun laws have been clearly shown to have fewer gun crimes. That doesn't necessarily work for everything. During prohibition, strong laws forbidding alcohol did somewhat reduce alcohol use, but it definitely didn't eliminate it, and it dramatically increased crime due to smuggling alcohol. For guns, the picture is much clearer. When they're harder to own legally there are fewer gun crimes.
In this case it's more "we need the same laws as the rest of the civilized world, which doesn't have all these problems with gun crimes".
I really think we're just having two completely different discussions here mate. I don't disagree with what you're saying. I never did.
I also don't know that I think it's worth the time to hash out at this point. We're just talking past each other.
Imagine applying that logic to anything else:
"He would have been murdered regardless of what laws were in place. There's no reason to change the penalty for murder! The 10c fine already ensures that only criminals will murder other people."
"The city already has a firefighter, and the city block still burned down! What's the point in adding more firefighters if we already have a firefighter and we still get major fires?"
...
The kids got the guns illegally because it's incredibly easy to get illegal guns in the US. The biggest reason for that is that it's so incredibly easy to get legal guns too. In places like Japan or England where it's hard to get legal guns, it's extremely hard to get illegal guns, so the criminals tend not to use illegal guns.
If "would have done so regardless" were true, there should be no difference in gun crime in the UK vs the US. But, they're not. It's not because the US has far more of a problem with mental illness or something, it's because the tool designed for killing is harder to get.
Well, in MY state random stops ARE illegal. Thanks Oregon! Frankly, I'm surprised more states haven't done that.
https://romanolawpc.com/oregon-dui-checkpoints/
There are things that CAN be done, you just have to start with rejecting the idea of "hurrr durrr take all the guns" because that can't be done due to the 2nd amendment.
In THIS case, we know the two kids already had priors for car burglaries.
So #1) You find out who legally owned those guns, then you charge them with improper storage and/or failure to report a stolen weapon.
#2) When kids are arrested for a crime like burglary, you search their homes to make sure weapons weren't anything that were burgled.
“The solution to ensuring our freedom to own guns is to restrict all our other freedoms. “