The six-year-old student who shot his teacher in the US earlier this year, boasted about the incident saying “I shot [her] dead”, unsealed court documents show.
While being restrained after the shooting at a Virginia school, the boy is said to have admitted “I did it”, adding “I got my mom’s gun last night”.
His teacher, Abigail “Abby” Zwerner - who survived - filed a $40m (£31.4m) lawsuit earlier this year.
The boy has not been charged.
The boy’s mother, however, Deja Taylor, has been charged with felony child neglect and misdemeanour recklessly leaving a loaded firearm as to endanger a child.
In Ms Zwerner’s lawsuit, filed in April, she accuses school officials of gross negligence for ignoring warning signs and argues the defendants knew the child "had a history of random violence
The documents also mention another incident with the same student while he was in kindergarten. A retired teacher told police he started “choking her to the point she could not breathe”.
Utilitarianism is about maximizing the wellbeing of all. Just like how in the trolley dilemma you would leave one person to die to save 5 others. This could very well be a utilitarian justification, if the underlying assumptions turn out to be true. Generally, if those violent children can never be rehabilitated so they go on harming more humans, then it would definitely be obvious that we should put it down, as the harm done by this is less than the harm that the child would inflict on others otherwise. But if such children can be rehabilitated, there would be no harm done at all. Compared to the harm done by putting it down, it becomes obvious again that the decision to rehabilitate it is the only correct one. I, being an utilitarian, think a society whose first thought is “rehabilitate” when someone did something wrong instead of “put it down” would turn out to be of greater wellbeing.