Debra Harrell is a South Carolina single mother who left her nine year old daughter in a local playground this past July while she worked as a shift manager at a McDonalds. There were other children and parents in the park, including many familiar to her and to her daughter. With school out, and organized activities relatively expensive, many parents shared Debras dilemma of finding someplace for children to be during the workday; her daughter was not the only one unaccompanied at the playground. Debra was arrested, spent 17 days in jail, temporarily lost custody of her daughter, and faces a charge of felony child neglect. Yesterday, a set of parents took their nine-year old to an Arizona shooting range as part of a tour run by a company called Bullets and Burgers. She was holding an Uzi submachine gun, and, with the gun in fully automatic mode (600 rounds/minute), she lost control of its powerful recoil, accidentally shooting her instructor in the head and killing him on the spot. No local or federal laws were violated. It seems obvious to me that the second set of parents are more deserving of criminal charges, and that more harm was done to the second girl than the first. (It also bears noting that the first case is of a working-class, single-parent, black family and the second case is of a two-parent, white family able to afford daytrips that begin at $200/person.)
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 04:51:43 +0000
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