An EIGHT year old boy calmly and methodically shot and killed his father and a lodger in the house with a .22 calibre rifle. A case of a child doing something in spontaneous haste? Oh no. The child used a single action hunting rifle from which he had to eject the shell each time he fired - and he shot each man at least four times.
To the average mind, this kind of behaviour by an eight year old child is inconceivable. It seems the conduct of a monster. But is it all part of the twisted psychology linked to America's obsession with the gun? We have seen so many occasions in the past where teenagers have acquired a gun and wreaked havoc in the shopping mall or on the college campus and, in every case, some investigation has gone on into their disturbed past and then America has gone on just as before.
This little boy's father was a hunter. He taught his young son to shoot almost as soon as he could walk. And he taught him pretty well, it would seem. The kid was unerringly accurate. The child was taught to kill prairie dogs when he was very young and one wonders what his father's attitudes actually were to shooting anything. Now heaven forbid that I should blame the victim in the case of a murder but - and this is rhetorical since I don't have the answers - was the parent's priority all wrong.
Was the child taught that being able to shoot a gun was manly and macho? That being accurate and deadly was important? Was he also taught that a gun was something you had to respect and use to kill only when it was necessary? Did his father talk to him gently about the sanctity of human life and how the weapon he held in his hand was so lethal that he had to think twice three times every time he pointed it at something ? Was his father the kind of man to get that message across or was that perceived as wet, sentimental woman's work?
And what happened with the maternal side of his upbringing. The parents had recently divorced and the father awarded custody. That's unusual. What kind of influence did his mother have? Did he hate his father over the marriage break up. Maybe we'll never know.
But a tiny child now stands accused of the murder - premeditated and cold-blooded - of his father and another man. Is this the manifestation of the ultimate horror...that American children have such ease of access to guns and so little understanding of the finality of their use? That a gun is a kind of fantasy toy that you read about in the comics..something that takes away all the troubles in your life?
The new President-elect is concerned about the degree of gun ownership in American homes and attitudes by some towards their use. But there is precious little he can do about them faced with the tough lobby of the National Rifle Association and the terrific amount of money poured in by pressure groups to maintain this perverse interpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
If it is impossible to take the guns away from American homes, as seems the case, maybe when he becomes President, Obama could spearhead a campaign for much tighter controls and maybe classes in infant schools to press home the message of how lethal a gun is. But I suspect it will all fall on deaf ears and I fear that some American children - like the little boy in Arizona - will continue to see the gun as the answer to all their problems without fully understanding the enormity of what they've done.
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