Remember last October’s horrific story of an 8-year-old girl who was shot and killed by her 11-year-old neighbor because she refused to show him her new puppy? The kid has just been convicted by a Jefferson County Juvenile Court judge.
MaKayla Dyer, a student at White Pine Elementary, was killed October 3, 2015, outside her home. Juvenile Judge Dennis “Will” Roach II, who presided over Tiller’s case, wrote in a court order that he was playing with MaKayla Dyer, her 11-year-old sister and her friend when he asked her to retrieve her puppies. After she said no, he went inside and came back with a 12 gauge shotgun and a bb gun, telling the girls he had guns.
“The victim then laughed at Mr. Tiller, and stated that she believed they were not real,” read the court documents. “Tiller then made certain the gun was loaded, cocked the hammer of the gun, and shot the victim just above the heart” from inside the window.
Dyer fell backwards and was later confirmed dead.
This heartbreaking story brought to you by bad parenting, gun culture, and the NRA. The 12-gauge belonged to the kid’s father, and if you think it’s perfectly okay to leave a 12-gauge within reach of an 11-year-old, you’re an asshole. Oh, but you say, it’s perfectly fine if they’ve had that Eddie Eagle training! Riiiight:
Judge Roach said Tiller had been trained in firearm safety and had been taken hunting by both his father and grandfather.
Clearly this kid was fucked up in the head, and I have to wonder why anyone would let their fucked up kid mess around with guns. I wondered this same thing about Nancy Lanza and Chris Harper-Mercer and I also wondered the same thing about Chris Kyle, who took PTSD-afflicted vets to a gun range as “therapy.” That just strikes me as supremely stupid. After every mass shooting people say “Oh, we just need to keep the guns out of the hands of the mentally ill,” yet those same people are the ones handing the mentally ill their guns in the first place!
And every time a child gets his or her hands on a gun and blows someone away we’re told “well, training …” and yet here’s a fucked up kid who had that training, which he apparently put to good use to blow away his neighbor.
So really, gun people just need to shut up, already.
