Incapacity

But with a child so young, traditional principles like punishment, accountability and rehabilitation "don't really apply," [University of Richmond law professor Julie Ellen] McConnell said. "As a 6-year-old, he just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to even understand how to form the intent to commit a crime like this."
A 6-year-old shooter raises difficult questions for the criminal justice system

Okay, I'll bite. Why not?

I used to work with children for a living (if you could call it that, given the salary) and one of the things that I came away with from the job is that adults tend to underestimate children's abilities to understand the world around them, especially power relationships. Take the unnamed child who shot an severely injured his teacher last week in Virginia. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that the student could have intended to injure the teacher over some action or another that he didn't like, and understood that guns are capable of injuring people. Children, after all, hit, kick and bite one another with dreary regularity, and it's common to not only impose a mild discipline, like a "time out" on a child when they do so, but to tell them that if they do so again in the future, another discipline would be forthcoming. If children are so intellectually incapable that they can't understand that their behavior draws disapproval, why does that behavior make any sense?

What many children seem to lack, in my understanding, is the idea that their current emotional state is not a blanket justification for anything they might do that stems from it. Granted, I've met more than a few adults who seem to have trouble with that reasoning, but still, it strikes me as being part of what sometimes strikes people as a lack of empathy in children. Sure, children will commonly say it's bad when other children hit them, but that's because children tend to never see being hit as a rational response to their own behavior. But "they started it" is less a childhood dodge of culpability than their standard way of looking at the world; children can having difficulty with the idea that their wants and desires aren't imperatives that the rest of the world needs to immediately indulge.

But more to the point, I don't know that I find casting children as mentally impaired when compared to adults a necessary step in deciding that sending them to juvenile detention is inappropriate. In Virginia, the minimum age for detention is 11. Whatever the reason for making that choice, it wasn't, and couldn't have been, based on some fact of biology that kicks in at a child's 11th birthday. It was a choice that was made because it seemed reasonable to the people who were making it. And that's all that's really needed in situations like this. It strikes me as unreasonable to lock small children up for long stretches of time, even for serious misbehavior. And part of of this is because, yes, children's outlooks on the world are different from adults; and their general inability to understand long-term consequences makes it somewhat pointless. But here in the United States, a large part of the legal system is about finding someone to punish, so that people understand that the world is "fair." Which is why the child's parents may now be under investigation for failure to keep the child from taking the gun. Perhaps if there wasn't such a need for an eye for an eye, there wouldn't be a need to equate childhood with brain damage.