NEWPORT NEWS — The Newport News Education Association President condemned the premise of the school division’s motion to dismiss Abigail Zwerner’s pending $40 million lawsuit.
The motion was filed last week by attorneys representing the School Board and argues that Zwerner, who was shot in her classroom at Richneck Elementary in January by a 6-year-old student, is only entitled to file a worker’s compensation claim because the injury she sustained from the shooting is a “workplace injury,” and that the shooting was a hazard of the job.
Charging parents for kids crimes will just be used as a weapon to lock up parents that authorities don't like. The only way to stop school shootings is to have better gun laws in the first place, as unpopular as that might be in America.
Maybe true to an small extent, but if you own a firearm and have a kid in the house, it's your responsibility to ensure they can't access it. Responsible gun ownership should be the norm and expectation, and to an extent legally required as well.
In that particular case, 100% the parents should be responsible as they failed in their duty to lock up their firearm like responsible firearm owners. It's the latter part that's important, it doesn't matter if they were also parents or not.
You can't apply a blanket rule to hold parents responsible for all of their kids criminal actions. It will lead to much more child abuse and worse.
I don't think anyone is saying they should be responsible because he performed a criminal action. They are saying they should be held responsible, at least as accomplices, because they facilitated access to the firearm that was used in the act. Parents obviously shouldn't be held responsible if their kids purchase weed from someone and use it where they had no involvement or knowledge, for example, but that's not what happened in this case.