Warning: Article has detailed accounts of the shooting
Breanna Gayle Devall Runions, 25, was charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse in the death of Evangaline Gunter.
The child’s parents, Adam and Josie Gunter, told ABC affiliate WATE that Evangaline had been in temporary custody at a home in Rockwood, which Runions shared with girlfriend Christina Daniels and another child, a 7-year-old girl.
Before the shooting, Evangaline and the older girl were being punished that morning by Runions for not waking up the women and for eating Daniels’ food without permission, according to the warrant and a statement from Russell Johnson, district attorney general for Tennessee’s 9th Judicial District. Runions struck both girls with a sandal before forcing them to stand in different corners of the women’s bedroom, authorities said the older girl told them.
After the shooting, the women drove Evangaline to a nearby Walmart location to meet an ambulance, Roane County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Boduch told the Roane County News, and the vehicle transported the girl to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. Boduch could not immediately be reached by HuffPost.
But it most likely wouldn’t, or at least that would have been a more unlikely story. Guns make killing trivially easy, a knife is at least a little harder.
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What’s the added difficulty here? Yes, in general you are correct but in this scenario it really wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference. A 4 year old’s capacity for self defence against an adult is basically zero, this one’s chances of getting to safety was basically zero. Even if you removed both guns and knives from the equation, they would have just used something else.
You really don’t see how shooting someone (yes, even a small child) is a much, much easier and quicker way to kill them?
That’s the thing, in this particular scenario, the way they did it, a gun wasn’t any easier or quicker at all. If anything it was the worse option because of noise and damage from bullet ricochet.
There are many other scenarios where your assertions are perfectly valid but right here, for this scenario…it doesn’t apply, and you’re missing the point in trying to make it apply.
It’s not about it being an easier or quicker death, it’s about it being easier and quicker for the perpetrator. It’s much easier to pull a trigger than to stab someone. She had the same opportunity for both, but the gun was easier.
There’s also a good chance she thought she could play it off as an accident. Obviously that won’t be the case with all the witness statements, but it would have been much harder to claim a fatal knife wound was an accident, and also less likely that an accidental knife wound would be fatal.
But that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
So in this particular scenario, the gun is actually not the easier option. Any particular advantage offered by the firearm is completely offset by the scenario, like the fact that there was only one target who was under their complete control.
I mean, she didn’t do a particularly good job playing off the gun as an accident either. If she were using the knife, she could say she was working in the kitchen, the kids were playing under her, she tripped, fell forward and plunged the knife into the kids neck. It’d be more believable than the gun safety story, as it relies a lot less on the adult being a completely clueless moron.
True, depending on how the genuine accident happens. Unless you’re stabbing someone 37 times in the chest, it is still perfectly possible to do a cover-up though.