boy says he was mad at his dog so he killed it

[mythology]

89. I seem to remember people mocking Senator Frist for making medical diagnosis from afar

You have absolutely no way of knowing if this kid can be fixed or not. None of us do. But as a society I believe we have an obligation to find out. He's 12. Yes this is awful, but he's 12.

It's simplistic and easy to assume that everybody who commits monstrous acts is a monster from birth because it distances us from them. But in that case, was there something in the water in Germany that caused so many to commit atrocities during the Holocaust? Or were they people who were capable of love who chose to act without it?

I don't know a single person who doesn't make choices every day that don't lead to suffering and death. But we hide from the consequences. We eat meat, or dairy or eggs from animals kept and killed for that purpose. We don't donate everything past subsistence level to alleviate the thousands of kids who will die today from lack of nutrition or medicine. But we don't see that so we can lie to ourselves and say that it's not our inaction that causes those deaths. But by making the choices we make, we necessarily don't make every other possible choice. IE we buy that computer rather than using the free one at the public library because it's more convenient, we buy that candy bar because hey it's only a dollar, we eat that steak because it didn't have a face by the time we saw it.

None of us are without sin. But go ahead and judge this kid as incapable of change. After all, you've never done anything that resulted in any unnecessary suffering right?

For all those who point out that serial killers often start with killing small animals, any idea what percent of animal killers go on to become serial killers? I couldn't find anything with a quick google search. Without knowing that, saying that many serial killers killed small animals is useless. For example, all serial killers were once children but that doesn't mean that all children become serial killers. You can't look at the subsection of people and then use that to predict the future without knowing how it differs from the population as a whole. It's bad pseudo-science at best.

Additionally the most recent evidence doesn't support the bed wetting as a predictor.