Bored and Strapped

[Content Note: Gun violence; death.]

Christopher Lane, a college baseball player from Australia going to school in Oklahoma, was out jogging while visiting his girlfriend's hometown when three teenage boys shot him in the back. Lane died of the gunshot(s).

Police Chief Danny Ford says Lane was randomly targeted by the teens who were "bored."

"They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: 'There's our target,'" Ford said. "The boy who has talked to us said, 'We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.'"

He said they followed the 22-year-old Lane, a student from Melbourne attending college on a baseball scholarship, in a car and shot him in the back before driving off.

Ford told the television station KOCO in Oklahoma City that one of the teens said they shot Lane for "the fun of it."

The three teenagers, 15-year-old James Francis Edwards Jr., 16-year-old Chancey Allen Luna, and 17-year-old Michael Dewayne Jones, have been charged [note: video begins to play automatically at link] with first-degree murder (Edwards and Luna) and being an accessory after the fact and using a vehicle during the discharge of weapon (Jones).

My sincere condolences to Lane's family, friends, teammates, and coaches.

Everything about this case is terrible.

Last weekend, my old friend Todd was visiting, and we were talking with another old friend over drinks about all the stupid stuff we did as teenagers, because we grew up in a small midwestern town that provided absolutely nothing to do for teenagers. We didn't get into much trouble (the worst thing we ever did was put a slice of pizza in the town library's overnight return slot), but mostly that's because we found ways of amusing ourselves (making silly movies; obsessing over music) that didn't put us in the eyeline of bored cops. If we'd been more inclined to skateboard or do donuts in the K-Mart parking lot, we might have gotten ourselves into more trouble.

My point is, it's easy to get into trouble when you're a bored kid in a small town. Even when you don't have access to a gun.

I'm not saying the gun (allegedly) turned these kids into the sort of empathy-free nightmare zones who think murder is an acceptable pastime when you're bored. I'm saying that among a lot of bored teenagers in a lot of small towns, there are going to be some kids who treat that chronic boredom with troublemaking, and among them are going to be kids whose troublemaking includes violent behavior. So maybe enough with the easy access to guns.

ENOUGH.