It appears there is no law that makes it a crime to be crazy.
This picture (left) drifted onto my facebook page the other day. You can read the "subplot of insanity and paranoia" here. It gave me a chance to think about a post I wrote some time back and the current hand wringing that is rightly going on about guns.
Seems this kid in California, a 5th grader or something, had a gun in his backpack. Kids being kids, there was some Tomfoolery in the hallway just before class and the backpack was dropped. As bad luck would have it the gun went off when it hit the ground; fired itself, so to speak. The bullet exited the backpack and went clear though the stomach of a student down the hall a bit, struck another child in the shoulder after slightly grazing another kid; generally resulting in one death and two woundings. The backpack kid's only comment was "Sorry man", as he picked up the backpack and went into class.
The kid didn't mean to kill anyone. He didn't fire the gun. That he had a gun in his backpack and that some absolutely crazy parent or some other insane fool bought a gun that found its way into the hands of a kid who put it in his backpack like it was just another pencil is the issue here.
No one was prosecuted. Just one kid dead by a gun that fired itself. When the school attempted to tighten things up a bit, backpack- wise and to hold the parents of kids responsible for gun safety - just like they hold parents responsible for failure to attend classes - the NRA and attendant gun crazies went ballistic, just like the father of the kid in the picture.
As I said at the start, there is a right to be crazy.
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