The US is seeming more bonkers day after day. These sorts of stories just don't make sense to me. We have issues in Ireland with children and teenagers going around engaging in anti-social behaviour but there is a balance to be found between these two extremes.
It's unfortunately very American. Build the entire environment for cars, with very little if any thought for pedestrians, and then put the parents in prison for letting their kids walk a few blocks home, while the driver of the enormous SUV that kills a child has no charges brought against them. We've entirely lost the plot here.
No, I read the article before I posted. The driver was not charged. There are plenty of articles that mention it, but here is from one of the top links on Google:
"The driver was not charged in the case, but both of Legend’s parents, Sameule and Jessica Jenkins, were charged with felony involuntary manslaughter and child neglect."
1) The US was rebuilt after WW2 to be highly car-centric, with disastrous results for pedestrian safety. It is actually more dangerous for children to move in public because of this automobile centricity in >95% of US spaces, which drives cultural shifts
2) US media is highly sensationalist; Fox News is popular and generally serves to make viewers frightened of the world
3) The US has 340M people to Ireland’s 5.6M people, so from a base rate, we’d expect ~60x more lurid headlines to come out of the US