World News @lemmy.ml BrikoX @lemmy.zip 2y ago

Boy, 6, boasted about shooting Virginia teacher Abigail Zwerner

www.bbc.co.uk Boy, 6, boasted about shooting Virginia teacher Abigail Zwerner

New court documents show the pupil confessed to the attack and outline how he took his mother's gun.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1253328

Archived version: https://archive.ph/Uk56Y
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230809192827/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66451768

26 comments

If that's not learned behavior I don't know what is.
- Oh shit yeah! That kid totally learned from his parent that violence was a solution to emotional issues. That kid is fucked for life (which is highly likely to be incredibly short) if at age six they already associate lethal violence as an appropriate solution for dealing with emotions.
  
  That kid will learn the lesson of fuck around and find out in a life-altering/ending way soon enough. If it's starting at age six, educating that out of him is going to be a near 90° uphill battle. And that parent squarely put that mentality into him.
  
  ... I'm not sure "90°" means what you think it means... 😅😶
  
  edit: Apologies, I'd assumed it was a compound phrase and not a janky one — as in, "opposite direction and also uphill" (therefore, 180°) rather than "describing a vertical surface as an incline". My bad. 🤷🏼‍♂️
only in america...
- Wait until you find out you can buy an AR-15 for kids in ‘Murica. JR-15.
  
  I thought Snopes shut down? Glad to see that's not the case.
  
  Oh god I wish I didn't read that. Bleh
This is the best summary I could come up with:

While being restrained after the shooting at a Virginia school, the boy is said to have admitted "I did it", adding "I got my mom's gun last night".

His teacher, Abigail "Abby" Zwerner - who survived - filed a $40m (£31.4m) lawsuit earlier this year.

Using his mother's gun, the boy shot his first-grade teacher, Ms Zwerner, in the hand and chest on 6 January at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia.

After the shooting, Ms Zwerner told police at hospital that she saw the child standing by his desk when he "pulled a firearm out of his jacket pocket and pointed it" at her, according to the newly released documents.

Amy Korvac, a reading specialist at the school, heard the gun shots and restrained the student until police arrived.

In Ms Zwerner's lawsuit, filed in April, she accuses school officials of gross negligence for ignoring warning signs and argues the defendants knew the child "had a history of random violence".

I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What the hell did that boy's mother teach him? Because it sure wasn't “sharing is caring.”
- From the little tidbits in the article she sounds like complete trash. Poor kid doesn't even have a chance. Glad the teacher survived though.
- “Share my lead”
So, bearing in mind I haven't heard of this case before and am just going on this one article, surely this kid shouldn't have been in mainstream education and clearly needed some specialist support. But ultimately the parents should be held morally and legally responsible for this, how THE FUCK can you not secure your gun and ammo to keep them out of the hands of your 6 year old. I hope the teacher and the kid get the support they need.
Is suing the school the right approach? Wouldn’t lack of funding be partly the cause of how the school was unable to prevent this in the first place?
- It's a public school so payout will come from the taxpayers and not the budget for school. And the issue is not that they couldn't prevent it, she reported the aggresive behaviour earlier in the day before being shot, but was ignored.
- For this specific case, yes to the first question, no to the second question.
  
  Admin refusing to do anything about a kid with a gun after being told a kid has a gun isn't a funding problem.
- If I remember correctly about this incident, it wasn't only that the school was warned about the child's behavior from previous incidents and from earlier that day and it had been ignored, as you have already received a comment about, but I believe the mother also called the school to tell them her gun was missing and she believed the child had it and they didn't do a thorough enough search for it - I believe they only looked in his backpack and not in his desk or jacket, etc.
Real question... Why is this kind of thing posted to World News? It's a horrifying story, but it's also one incident in one location. Me knowing about it doesn't help me or anyone else in any way. I guess you could hope that it inspires some gun owners to better secure their firearms, but that's about it.

This kinda one-off incidents were all over Reddit. It just exists to stoke people's anger most of the time, but it's also super easy to push a specific agenda by posting these horrible, local stories.
- Mostly it's a result of me cross-posting from my own community which is less strict about what I consider news and the publisher in this case BBC labeling it as world news. I get all my news from RSS.
This kid is dead at 9, I’m calling it now. There will be a police shootout with a 9 year old. This where we’re heading.

26 comments