It worked after a while. She was a mean old woman but at least she didn't shoot any of us.


I'm so sorry for that family. He was just a kid, playing a game that has been around forever.

This guy will try “I was scared for my life as a young boy ran away from my house” and might prevail in gun country.

I'd challenge every potential juror on their attitude toward guns and "castle doctrine" to avoid such a thing.

few justifications for shooting someone. Maybe if they’ve tried to kill you several times and they left a bomb on the front porch and you decide not to put up with it. But not in this case or some poor guy rummaging through your carport.

then one shouldn’t close the distance between you and the baddy by going to the door. If one gets a gun then also get a doorbell that allows you to see and communicate either however is outside by the door.

or is in the witness protection program or something, and a ringing doorbell prompts them to get a gun, they probably shouldn't have access to guns.

the fact that the kid was outside and shot in the back, should put that to rest.

Yes, I know - "should".

Where is that little motherfucker these days anyway?

The whole country is armed to the teeth and paranoid. Great job, GOP.

I played it and my kids too... Wtaf? This gun crazy world needs to stop 🥺

to do any good are a pipe dream now, to our detriment.

as much as they just want to bring them into the fold. Y'know, you stand out less in a crowd and all that.

You can own a firearm and choose NOT to go towards potential danger.

Too many don’t put in the time and effort to identify what the threat or threats are and then come up with a plan on how best to respond to the threat and then practice that plan on a regular basis.

What I see here at DU are people saying others should get a gun or guns but make no mention of the commitment that is required in learning how to handle a gun in an emergency situation.

As children.Between toilet papering yards and ringing door bells, I’m surprised I’m still alive.

It was annoying for the recipients - especially if you were trying to get TP out of a tree (best to let it just decay in the rain) - but the worst that could happen to most kids is they got hollered at and their parents were told and they had to go back to the neighbors and clean up the TP.

ditch at the request of his dad who is in the background encouraging him? He referred to it as a childhood ritual.

When I saw it, I knew something like this would happen.

Damn, I did that a few times myself in the 80's. Horrible overreaction. RIP.

Fuck the gun humpers. They make us much less safe.

I can't believe I need to say this, but it's not really safe to be running around doing stupid stuff like that in this day and age with so many people who now own guns. Too many people with 17 pit bulls kept off the leash in their yard.

I think of that poor sweet kid who played the bass clarinet who was just going to pick up his younger sibling from a friend's house and knocked on the wrong door and that crazy old man shot him. There are crazy people out there. And getting someone who is mentally not quite right all stirred up by playing ding dong ditch is a really stupid idea when we have so many assault rifles out there, and parents need to be smart and tell their kids that it's not just a prank and it could be dangerous because you don't know who's on the other side of that door.

Now some little kid is gone and their family is forever broken. Tiktok is also to blame for encouraging challenges and pranks like this.

His and his parents'.

It's like the "modern parable" my mom once told me about three small-town teen boys who went to a dance, where a big fight broke out. They were jailed overnight, as most every guy there was.

The next day, thinking they'd done something wrong, they went to their preacher and asked what they should've done. He told them, "Well, boys, I just wouldn't have been at the dance."

What my mom failed to explain was how the guys were to know the fight would happen at an event that was designed to be just for fun.

But I absolutely maintain that things many of us did generations ago that were a silly, harmless prank may play very differently now when so many people have AR-15s and are literally shooting through the door when people ring their doorbell.

This isn't Mayberry.

You just very strongly implied he "shouldn't have been at the dance." Twice, now.

An 11-ear-old boy is dead at the hands of an armed paranoid psychopath, just like the Black teen who went to the wrong house a few months ago. Think about that for awhile.

their kids "not to be at this particular dance."

Absolutely. 100%.

A generation or two ago, was this a harmless prank we all did? Sure. We are living in very different times now. You have no idea who is on the other side of that door, and there are too many stories on the news about crazed people with AR-15s literally shooting children for ringing a doorbell (again, I referenced the bass clarinet kid in my first post who was just trying to pick up his siblings from a friend's house and accidentally went to the wrong house and a crazy gun owner shot him through the door.)

There are too many assault rifles in this country and the people who are collecting them in mass numbers are exactly the people who probably shouldn't have them.

That makes ding dong ditch not such a good idea in 2025. It's a safety issue. Parents absolutely should be teaching kids that it is not safe to be pranking random houses in this way. You have no idea if the person on the other side of the door is mentally unstable and has an assault rifle.

U.S. gun culture changes a societal practice, standard or tradition. Kids can't be kids anymore. They can't go out and play at the things kids have always played. Every week or so in schol, they have to practice what to do in case another armed psychopat's fucked-up brain chemicals make him decide to go hunting for the most innocent, most vulnerable prey.

And, as always, we address protection from these armed psychopaths rather than the armed psychopaths themselves, bcause almost 250 years ago sone "smart" people threw a bone to some other "smart" people and made it the supreme law of the land that, basically, everybody who wants a gun can have one. And that supreme law has resisted all efforts to change a si gle word or even define key words such as "arms" and "militia," because there's a whole lot of money and power in keeping it exactly as written all those years ago.

I just can't accept that, but there's nothing I can do about it. Worse, there's nothing that 11-year-old's parents andrelatives can do about it, either.

I often see people on DU say this is our country; we run it. Let them tell that to the armed psychopaths and the people "in power" who don't do anything about them until after their psychopathy and their constitutionally untouchable arms have combined to murder children.

Because he rang a door bell and some one had to get off their dead ass and answer the door. Jesus !

A young life lost.

Parents, hold your children tight and know where they are at all times. The world is not the same any more and you must be constantly vigilant. Shouldn’t have to be that way, but it is.

It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. It's the fucking guns. Did I mention it's the fucking guns?