Althouse

Tony Romanucci, a lawyer for Mr. Nichols’s family, said the family is asking the Memphis Police Department to disband the specialized unit that was formed to help halt a surge of violence in the city. “The intent of the SCORPION unit has now been corrupted,” he said....

The release of the video is scheduled for sometime after 6 p.m. Central time on Friday.... Officials and the Nichols family pleaded with the public not to let outrage over what they see on the video spill into unrest....

"The boy and the teacher had been involved in an altercation in a classroom before the boy shot the teacher once, the police said.... The boy was in police custody Friday evening, the authorities said, but the unusual nature of the situation leaves the path forward far from clear.... Under Virginia law, a 6-year-old cannot be charged as an adult. And while it is possible the child could be charged criminally in juvenile court, the minimum age to be sentenced to a juvenile prison in Virginia is 11. 'The juvenile justice system is not really equipped to deal with really young kids who commit criminal offenses and is probably the wrong place to deal with a situation like this,' said Andrew Block, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law...."

From "After 6-Year-Old Is Accused in School Shooting, Many Questions and a Murky Legal Path/The teacher who was shot was in stable condition on Saturday, the police said, but details surrounding the gun remained unknown" (NYT).

The question cannot be what to do to a 6-year-old child. What has already been done to him that he is so ruined at the age of 6?

The teacher suffered life-threatening injury but has not died, but I wanted to see how young a child has committed murder. Here's a list at Wikipedia. A 4-year-old named Retta McCabe is said to have committed murder in 1897. The "beautiful, blue-eyed, golden-haired child" threw her infant brother onto the floor and "sprang upon the babe and beat it with all her might." The next youngest children on Wikipedia's list are 6 year olds. There were 3, including the killer of Kayla Renee Rolland in 2000:

Kayla Rolland was killed by a six-year-old male first grader at Buell Elementary School in the Beecher Community School District, located in Mount Morris Township, Michigan.... His father, Dedric Owens, was in jail for violating his parole.... The boy had been living with his mother, Tamarla, and his eight-year-old brother. She was evicted from her home... and both boys then shared a single sofa as a bed at their uncle's house. The home, where his uncle lived with a 19-year-old man, was a crack house where guns were frequently traded for drugs....

The boy was known to have behavioral issues, and was made to stay after school nearly every day for swearing, giving people the finger, pinching, and hitting. Some weeks before the shooting he stabbed a girl with a pencil. Chris Boaz, a seven-year-old classmate, claimed the boy once punched him because he would not give him a pickle. The boy had previously attacked Kayla Rolland and, on the day prior to the killing, tried to kiss her and was rebuffed....

"... that she thought was her friend playing with her dog. Then she heard someone crying, and a man saying something like, 'It’s OK, I’m going to help you.' When the roommate peered out of her room just after 4 a.m., she later told investigators, she stood in 'frozen shock'... Authorities have yet to detail a motive in the killings, nor has there been any explanation for why the two surviving roommates, who are also students at the University of Idaho, did not call 911 until shortly before noon the next day...."  

From "A Knife Sheath, Phone Pings and Trash: The Hunt for a Killer in Idaho/On the night four college students were killed, a roommate saw a man clad in black walk through the home. It took a cross-country investigation to find a suspect" (NYT). 

ADDED: When I first wrote this post — a few minutes ago — I mistook "Kernodle" as the name of the surviving roommate who is discussed at length but not named. Given what she heard, why didn't she call the police much sooner? Another way to look at that is: Why didn't the killing of 4 persons make much more noise, noise that obviously required calling the police (and/or escaping from the house)?

"She was pronounced dead a few minutes later. 'I am sorry for what I did,' McLaughlin had said in a final written statement. 'I am a loving and caring person.'... The clemency petition cited McLaughlin’s traumatic childhood and mental health issues... [and] said that McLaughlin had received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.... But McLaughlin’s sexual identity was 'not the main focus' of the clemency request, her lawyer, Larry Komp, said. She was originally convicted in 2006 of the murder of Beverly Guenther, 45, who had taken a restraining order.... 'McLaughlin terrorised Ms Guenther in the final years of her life but we hope her family and loved ones may finally have some peace,' [said Missouri Governor Mike Parson, who denied clemency]."

From "Amber McLaughlin: first transgender woman is executed in Missouri" (London Times).

ADDED: The London Times used the term "sexual identity," which made me think maybe in London the preference for "gender identity" has yet to take hold, but searching the Times archive, I see that "gender identity" is more common. For example, here are 2 pieces from a couple weeks ago: "The gender issue is now a religion. Fear of blaspheming keeps sensible people quiet" ("This is what happens when you legislate based on faith. And gender identity is a faith...") and "Parents lose court fight against gender lessons/Sex education is about tolerance, says judge" ("A group of parents has lost a legal challenge against the teaching of gender identity and sex to seven-year-old children in Welsh primary schools").

From "Idaho Murder Suspect Had Been a Student of the Criminal Mind/The arrest of a graduate student in the murder of four University of Idaho students eased fears but raised a troubling new question: What was the motive?" (NYT). Kohberger studied criminology and served as a teaching assistant.

"... the push of veneration, the pull of elimination. The United States with its chrome-plated dreams of spit-shine modernity was never much for the admiration of its senior citizens. Way before taunts of 'Okay, boomer' and the calling of people with experience the pejorative term 'olds' this country has had a tendency to isolate the grizzled dotard, if not on an ice floe then in retirement camps where they could gum pudding and play bingo away from the delicate eyes of youth. It would be easy to blame the sixties, with silly slogans like 'Don’t trust anyone over thirty' or even sillier movies like Wild in the Streets, where anyone over thirty-five is herded in camps and given mandatory doses of LSD."

So writes Bob Dylan, in "The Philosophy of Modern Song."

So, of course, I google "senicide," and I'm reading this Wikipedia article "Senicide," while picturing 81-year-old Bob Dylan reading it too. Highlights:

The Heruli were a Germanic tribe during the Migration Period (about 400 to 800 CE) [who]  placed the sick and elderly on a tall stack of wood and stabbed them to death before setting the pyre alight....

Herodotus says of the Padeans of India: "... It is said to be their custom that when anyone of their fellows, whether man or woman, is sick, a man's closest friends kill him, saying that if wasted by disease he will be lost to them as meat; though he denies that he is sick, they will not believe him, but kill and eat him...."

In Nordic folklore, the ättestupa is a cliff where elderly people were said to leap, or be thrown, to death. While the practice has no historical evidence, the trope has survived as an urban legend, and a metaphor for deficient welfare for the elderly....

Herodotus tells us about the Massagetae that: "Though they fix no certain term to life, yet when a man is very old all his family meet together and kill him, with beasts of the flock besides, then boil the flesh and feast on it. This is held to be the happiest death; when a man dies of an illness, they do not eat him, but bury him in the earth, and lament that he did not live to be killed.

Contemporary Culture — In modern day western-culture, senicide often takes the form of placing senior citizens in overcrowded conditions where preventable diseases can easily spread. More often than not, these spaces are separate from other generations of people so problems such as quality of life, hygiene and isolation are less detectable to the wider population.

There are 3 citations for that last proposition, and all 3 are about Canada. 

I'm giving this post my tag "gerontocracy," thought the topic is only implied. We currently have a gerontocracy in the United States, but when these old people were young, there was "Wild in the Streets":

"Andre was kind of picked on a little bit by some associates at the store.... There were definitely other employees that made fun of him.... He didn’t have a social life.... It was work, home. Home, work. It didn’t seem like he had much of a support system, if any.... He was known in the store for being hostile at times.... He had too many moments where he’d be overly aggressive."

Said Nathan Sinclair, a former Walmart employee, quoted in " Walmart shooter described as aggressive, angry, but motive unclear" (WaPo).

"... subduing him. Two patrons then pinned the gunman down until police could arrive, according to the club’s owners, who viewed security video."

From "Here are the latest developments in the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting" (NYT).

It's hard to picture grabbing a handgun from a man who is in the middle of using it. But then to use the gun to hit the erstwhile gunman.... I guess your hand is not in the position to fire the gun. It's reversed and pointing more or less at you. And isn't the gunman's hand grabbing to get back to the trigger and shoot you? Once you've gone that far, perhaps the only thing you can do is to grip the barrel and clobber the guy with the grip.

Is that what happened?

Whatever happened, kudos to the man who disarmed the murderer.

CORRECTION: Oh, no. The difficult tangle I tried to picture is wrong. The murderer was using a rifle and carrying a handgun. That made the handgun easier to grab and to grab by the grip. If you got that far, would you use the handgun to hit the murderer?

IN THE COMMENTS: Enigma reminds me that there is a standard term for hitting someone with a gun: "pistol-whipping." Actually, there are 2 terms — "pistol-whipping" and "buffaloing," as I learned from the Wikipedia article, "Pistol-whipping":

Pistol-whipping or buffaloing is the act of using a handgun as a blunt weapon, wielding it as an improvised club....

The term "buffaloing" is documented as being used in the Wild West originally to refer to the act of being intimidated or cheated by bluffing. It would develop into a term meaning to strike someone with a handgun in the 1870s when Stuart N. Lake reported Wyatt Earp doing so.... The new use of the term developed because the act of hitting someone with their revolver was seen as an additional insult to the character of the victim....

The practice of using the handgun itself as a blunt-force weapon began with the appearance of muzzle loaders in the 15th century. Single-shot weapons that were tedious to reload were used to strike opponents directly in close-quarters combat after their projectile had been expended. It was entirely up to circumstance whether the user had time or chose to reverse the gun in their hand and strike a blow with its handle or merely swung the heavy weapon as a club or baton holding it normally....

Author Paul Wellman notes that clubbing an opponent with the butt of a gun held by its barrel, as seen in some Westerns, is problematic. First, the danger of an unintentional discharge could fatally wound the wielder. Second, many early revolvers of the black-powder cap and ball era, were relatively fragile around their cylinders relative to solid single-shot weapons. Third, rotating a gun so that it can be held by its barrel takes extra time, potentially crucial in a conflict.

To avoid the risk of damage or potential delay, pistol-whipping may be done with the gun held in an ordinary manner, hitting the target with an overhand strike from either the barrel or the flank of the gun above the trigger. It was a fairly common way to incapacitate a man in Western frontier days....

The practice was seen as a means of avoiding fatal confrontations. Instead of opening fire, an officer could knock someone unconscious with the barrel of their revolver which they claimed lowered mortality rates. This technique would later be considered a form of police brutality....

AND: The NYT has more detail on the man who took down the killer: "An Army Veteran Says He Went Into ‘Combat Mode’ to Disarm the Gunman/Richard M. Fierro, who served for 15 years in the military, said he was at Club Q in Colorado Springs with his family, and took down the man who killed five people."

Fiero was at the bar with his wife and daughter to see a drag show. When the shooting began, he got down on the floor, but when "he saw the gunman move through the bar toward a door leading to a patio where dozens of bar patrons had fled... he raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him."

The gunman, who Mr. Fierro estimated weighed more than 300 pounds, sprawled onto the floor, his military-style rifle landing just out of reach. Mr. Fierro started to go for the rifle, but then saw that the gunman had a pistol as well.

“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Mr. Fierro said.... [H]e yelled for other club patrons to help him. A man grabbed the rifle and moved it away to safety. A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels....