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.
Runions pressed the barrel of the gun against the child’s chest and pulled the trigger, police said she told them.
Daniels told police that she saw Runions take out the gun, remove its magazine and put it to Evangaline’s chest, but she turned away and didn’t see her pull the trigger, according to the warrant.
This was a murder.
yeah it’s 100% just a murder. probably she thinks by saying it’s an “accident” she can either skate or get a manslaughter conviction instead of murder.
people do forget about the chambered round all the time.
But. I ain’t holding my breath, either.
people do forget about the chambered round all the time.
all the time?? And y’all still are having debates on whether it might be time to maybe start looking at how you may act on the issue? America seems fucking crazy from the outside looking in…
Yup. All the time.
And yes, I’m all for gun control. The sad thing is these people vote.
Yes, what the hell kind of gun safety lesson was that? Here is exactly what NOT to ever do.
“Here kid, don’t do exactly this or you’ll Alec Baldwin someone.”
Tries to “teach gun safety” by breaking all 4 major gun safety rules at once
Yeah, not buying her story lol.
You could say her gun safety knowledge was a little bit…
…Rusty…
Look, I’m one of the first to say Americans are dangerously obsessed with firearms, but this wasn’t a firearms issue - it was straight up murder. This wasn’t an attempt to teach with any sort of responsibility or following any safety at all. If anyone tried to teach my kids firearm safety by sticking the barrel in their chest they would be decked.
First rule - every firearm is loaded. Every. Fucking. Firearm. Is. Loaded.
That is a firearms issue.
Untrained, irresponsible people are getting access to guns.
I fully agree irresponsible people are getting access, but this goes beyond firearms and training. There is irresponsible ownership and use, and then there is putting a firearm in the chest of a child, right after removing a loaded mag and pulling the trigger. Using my car analogy - there is irresponsible not wearing a seat belt, and then there is putting a kid on the roof and going off roading. First one - training, laziness, responsibility and access issue, second one is straight up murder.
You understand this is simply another example of “people who should never have access to guns because they’re too immature/angry/stupid” which is all anybody is asking.
There are a lot of crazy rednecks out there who are not safe with guns, we need a way to stop them specifically from having them.
And this enraged the gun lobby because many of them know that sometimes, they’re that moron.
I say this as an extremely responsible gun owner.
Unfortunately, no matter how responsible you may be the rules apply to all. The only way to make meaningful changes is for the responsible gun owners to limit their own access via licences, vetting, restrictions and quality registration systems and to push government to apply it to everyone. It is a culture problem, and needs those on the right side of the rules to bring everyone’s standards up.
You completely misunderstand me.
We need many more restrictions, many, many more, there are far too many insane idiots out there with guns.
I think I do understand - just elaborating in how to implement it.
Then we agree, the problem is so many pro-gun types have a sociopathic mindset and try to work from there: society is potentially their enemy, so I need to be armed for when it decides to come for me.
That’s not what this was. This wasn’t a lack of training, this wasn’t irresponsible behavior, this goes way beyond neglect or ignorance. This was murder, full on. Not an accident.
It’s both.
Not a firearm issue? Wtf killed her?
No wonder we’ll never solve this issue. Idiots
This is like saying its a car issue because I tried to teach a 4 year old road safety by speeding at them and slamming on the brakes. Its not the car thats the issue.
Given the psychological effect of owning a gun, or having access to one has on a person, I honestly feel like we’re in the same mental health territory as any behavioral antagonist, like leaving an addictive substance around an addict. You take a gun and put everything it means in a person’s hands - the power, the mythology, the kind of baggage it comes with in this country - and it’s gonna have some kind of effect.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve witnessed, and am aware of many cases where drivers of certain kinds of cars - big, fast, whatever - do stupid, reckless, dangerous, even murderous things because of the feeling of power and control their vehicle gives them. It’s the psychology of the damn things that makes people crazy.
We have a phrase for it, oddly enough: “it’s like leaving a loaded gun on the table”
Cars are not weapons. They are dangerous, but they haven’t been invented to kill. You also need to do an exam before you’re allowed to drive a car.
Oh, im still surprised you don’t need a course and license like every other country in the world.
Firearms are tools and serve a purpose, and must be treated the same as every other tool… you know, like years to get a drivers license?
And fir the record - vehicles have absolutely been used as weapons as everything from vehicular assault to IEDs.
Exactly. It was murder and its pissing me off the news is making it about firearm safety gone wrong. And the poor kids sound like they were abused in this foster care setting… This girl was shot point blank in the chest. Hope there is some justice.This poor child.
I agree with your points, but I also think that if firearms were more regulated, this woman may not have even gotten a gun in the first place. We don’t know her history, but if she did something like this, I wouldn’t be shocked if she didn’t have the cleanest of records.
In a civilised country this person would not have had access to a firearm, so it is most definitely a gun issue.
temporary custody
Why is it next to impossible for people to get approved to adopt, but any asshole can become a foster parent? I think you need more in-depth screenings to adopt from pet rescues. If the US is going to force pregnancy on people, then they really need to get a handle on the foster system. Because it’s always about “protecting the children,” right?
Went through the foster care/guardianship in Oregon for us. These kinda stories make me Soo mad. I have a lot of First hand experience with the Oregon foster system… I am adopted myself. I Was in 97 to a single woman in her late 50s (I loved my mom, make no mistake she was great and may she RIP) but it was super easy for her to adopt me… like really easy…
THAT SAID… My husband and I also had to get custody of my nephew from my sister. It was a terrible experience and I almost warn people who are interested in being a foster because of our experience…
My husband and I went through hell and back in Oregon to be become foster parents just so we could take our nephew out of foster care. As we went through the process, We got accused of only wanting him for money by a foster care certifier. (mind you the amount they pay is pennies a month for a kid) God that woman was outrageous and we had to complain to my nephews case worker, that her co-worker was sabotaging our nephews chance at permanent placement and almost backed out because she made us look so bad for asking questions and curious about how to afford this child. Very relevant question to ask, wouldn’t you say? (This foster certifier was very Catholic made it very know to me and my husband. She got upset with us when we told her we are not religious and had to tell us about all the Catholic churches and schools he should be in… and at the time, we were also not married. (Gasp I know!!)
So she put in her report, that she was suspicious of us and our reasons for being interested in this child for suspicious reasons. This was my nephew!! I was there when he was born and everyday since till he went to foster care. My mom died.in 2020 and my sister couldn’t parent without her support… I wanted him home… it was that simple!! But this worker made It a fucking nightmare and I was sooooo angry.
Thanks to his case worker appealing for us and showing the judge the errors the certifier was claiming we finally got the foster parent certification and are now full fledged guardians of him and have yearly check ins… it was a headache and almost impossible with how long it took…
So when I see stories like this and someone who got be a foster who clearly shouldn’t be, INFURIATINES ME!!! we had to work so hard and show everything (not that it was a problem for us, we expected it) but to see those who didn’t get held to the same standards and a kid gets hurt through negligence pisses me off!!
It’s almost like a terribly under funded government system with horrible pay that can be soul crushing doesn’t attract the best possible employees. I’m sure they know that woman is a horrible zealot who they’d love to replace. There’s no one that wants that job though.
Social services in America are embarrassing. Like it’s strait up shameful how bad our systems that are required for a functional society are ran. Reagan successfully demonized government spending as “wasteful” on anything a perfect American nuclear family wouldn’t need. Now everything is shit and the answer to needing government assistance for anything is good luck.
So much this!! And I am definitely a victim of it myself as a child growing up… at least I was able to save my nephew
Removed by mod
They’ll just put the group homes on the coal mine’s property. Boom, two birds with one stone. Like the ol “company store” days almost.
I just watched the “Three Slaps” episode of Atlanta and it was tense and terrifying.
For people who, like me, saw the gap between “teaching firearm safety” and first degree murder, the method outlined in the article for teaching firearm safety seemed to involve putting the barrel of the gun to the child’s chest and pulling the trigger. The witness, the other child living in the home, says that the killer did pull the magazine before the ‘safety lesson’ though. Technically this might make premeditation difficult to prove and could hinder a first degree murder conviction but I also think that a jury will figure out some way to make this monster go away forever regardless of what the letter of the law says.
I mean, IANAL but I think it’s pretty easy to argue that anyone with the bare minimum knowledge of firearms and intent to teach safety would know that:
-
You presume the gun is always loaded.
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You check the chamber, even after pulling the mag. And then still treat the gun as loaded.
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You don’t start the lesson by putting the barrel of the gun to anyone’s chest and pulling the trigger. Because you don’t do that when treating a gun as if its loaded.
With those three points, which again, I would argue constitutes the bare minimum to anyone attempting to teach firearm safety, a skilled prosecutor could argue there was some sort of intent. She would have known those things, yet didn’t do those things, and so behaved in a way that indicates other intent. Easier to argue manslaughter, of course, but it’s just so egregious I can see why they’d push for 1st degree.
The standard for first degree murder is higher than the mens rea required for most crime. It’s not just an intent to kill, it’s a premeditated plan to kill.
I think they pushed for first degree because most people see murdering a child as the most bad murder you can do and first degree murder as the most bad murder charge you can convict someone of. To do any less would invite political attacks for being “soft on crime” but I think it’s a lot to try to argue that this person must have intended to kill this child because no one could possibly be that stupid. Any time I’ve ever thought “no one could possibly be that stupid and cruel” I’ve been unpleasantly surprised.
Doesn’t matter to me if you’re anal but what did that have to do with anything?
I do, but that’s neither here nor there unless you want to buy me a drink first
What I don’t is have a license to practice law anywhere in the English-speaking world.
IANAL stands for “I am not a lawyer”
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This is reason #9,278 why conservatives should not be allowed near children.
And reason #53759742269743 why guns should be extremely restricted.
Wtf does this article have to do with conservatives? Liberals and swing voters own guns too, you know.
The difference is most liberals don’t want dumb people to have guns. This person might be a liberal, but if other liberals had their way, the girl would still be alive.
While I don’t disagree with you on the gun issue. This particular instance just looks like intended murder. I have a feeling this child would have been killed regardless of the gun. You don’t just accidentally put a gun to a child’s chest and shoot.
Liberals have guns, but liberals aren’t stupid enough to point a gun at a child. It’s extremely obvious to everyone except conservatives that this woman is a conservative.
Cause there are no stupid liberals…
You really need to
touch grassmeet a few people. Stupidity spans both sides and all political spectrums.While you’re technically right why don’t we all go look up the lowest iq states in the USA and see how they consistently vote,shall we?
This is the kind of lazy comment I would expect to see here. It makes me want to go back to Reddit. What are you, 14?
And this is coming from a liberal
You fail to realise that this isn’t a matter of liberals vs. conservatives, it’s the fact that guns themselves are stupid and legislation rewarding that is archaic and dangerous in the U.S.
Yes, no liberal has ever murdered a child.
The fact alone that this woman is gay goes against your “muh conservative” argument, considering the fact that LGBT is not a conservative concept in the slightest.
It’s not stupid when you do something intentionally. You say “liberals aren’t stupid enough to point a gun at a child” like this was an accident. She literally pressed the gun up against the child’s chest after hitting them with fucking sandals, due to the children failing to wake up fully grown adults and the 4 year old “eating food without permission”.
Motherfucker not every damn thing in the news is about politics, this has nothing to do with politics and you have no idea what her political alignment is whatsoever.
Do not begrudge getting older…so few get the opportunity.
4 year old wiped off this world because a 25 year old woman shot her in an attempt to intimidate and scare her. there was no firearms safety class being taught; if my mother wanted to “show me something” it was always to rub my nose in the proverbial piss of some mistake i had made in her eyes. That is what i see here for this “gun class”
Very upsetting story. This young girl was failed by every adult in her life.
These fucking backward degenerates should not be allowed to touch guns.
This is the world’s opinion of all Americans.
Immigration trends would beg to differ.
You wanna teach firearm safety to a four year old, keep your guns safely locked up and practice using a hose pipe. If that murderer beams you with the hose, don’t let them have your gloc because they gunna Bury you.
“I know it’s only been a few months since you stopped using sippy cups, but I think you’re ready for this 9mm Glock.”
Every gun owner thinks they’re a responsible gun owner.
Can’t argue, she is responsible for this.
😅
You didn’t even read the article, taking a gun and putting it to a child’s chest and pulling the trigger is not practicing gun safety, this child was deliberately killed.
She took out the magazine, so it’s quite arguable that she’s just a fucking idiot and did not intent to kill the child. That being the case would make this a “responsible gun owner” discussion.
Also possible she is lying to try to pretend she made a mistake.
Witnesses stated she removed the mag.
She didn’t rack the chamber. You can argue that she intentionally made it look like an accident.
You didn’t even read the article
Yes I did. It did not change my opinion. Every gun owner thinks they’re a responsible gun owner. Too few are right.
She pulled out a firearm and pointed it at child’s chest. If you take a firearm, and point it at someone, it is ALWAYS with malicious intent, loaded or not.
People can downvote me all they want but I don’t give a shit, this is the truth, this is why she is getting charged with first degree murder ffs. This was not an accident.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to continue believing that you are a responsible gun owner.
I keep my firearms locked in a safe. I have no children in my household. The firearms stay clean and they only come out when I go to practice or in a life or death situation. The firearm travels totally unloaded with the slide removed in a hard case. It is assembled and disassembled on site, and I clean it when I come home, which is done about once a month, if a little less.
If that’s not responsible gun ownership, then you can’t have responsible car ownership either. Simply looking in any direction besides right in front of you can kill someone! That includes checking the mirrors, but wait, shouldn’t you sometimes check the mirrors to make sure you aren’t in a dangerous position as well?
Almost seems like something we use every day is more dangerous than an unloaded, disassembled firearm. But I don’t handle my firearms responsibly, nope.
What was even your point in that statement? Did you even think before you wrote that? You totally missed the point of the article because you got starry eyes from the headline.
Every gun owner, regardless of how responsible or irresponsible they are, thinks they’re a responsible gun owner.
Some are right. Too many are wrong.
You can continue to ignore this and go on for paragraph after angry paragraph about why you think you’re one of the responsible ones. It doesn’t matter. Soon there will be another victim of the malice or negligence of someone who thought they were a Responsible Gun Owner.
Every car owner thinks they’re a responsible car owner as well. As you are no doubt aware, many of them are also wrong. Not sure how you thought your analogy negated my statement.
What policies do you imagine I’m advocating for here?
Your tone is implying that you think I am somehow an irresponsible gun owner, but that doesn’t matter because the argument is not about me to begin with. Let’s not get sidetracked here.
Also angry? If I were angry I wouldn’t waste my time continuing this debate. If you are going into this debate with anger and a closed mind then not only are you wasting your own time, you are wasting my time too and I do not appreciate that.
My analogy negates your statement because nobody is rallying for the ban of cars, only guns. This is because cars at the moment are a necessity for medium distance travel because public transportation is ass and no business wants people to work from home. We also do not grow our own food and as such, have to drive in order to buy a week or two of groceries.
Conversely, guns are a necessity in a country where they are within every nook and cranny, they weave in and out between the cracks. Just like how every country has a nuclear stockpile and an army as a deterrent to others invading and waging war on them, you need firearms in a place that is full of people who use them maliciously. Not everyone needs a firearm, but all it takes is to have ONE PERSON with a concealed firearm in a public place to stop a threat.
I have no problem with licensing firearms whatsoever, and as a matter of fact, many places require you to register for conceal carry which is how you should carry a firearm in public to begin with. Would I rather this not have to be the solution? In a perfect world, yes, but in a perfect world we wouldn’t need self defense either.
Again, removing the gun in this situation would have stopped nothing. This wasn’t a public shooting, this woman had intent to kill in close proximity. Restricting all firearms based on this alone would be extremely naive, and it is not the solution to this problem. There was nothing indicating she wanted to kill people, it is all on this one singular child.
CPS needs better screening, kids in temporary custody get abused fairly often. If the government felt the need to remove this child from her parents, she should have went to a better home. This woman is to blame, but the government is as well. Their job was to protect and they ultimately failed. You can restrict firearms all you want, but if kids keep going to houses like this, they are going to continue to get hurt and damaged for life. That’s the point of this argument and article, not fucking guns like everyone likes to point the finger at.
Kind of like every dog owner. Except that most dogs have redeeming value.
This was a murder, plain and simple. She put a gun up to the girl’s chest and pulled the trigger.
Was gonna come in here to say “The first rule of gun safety is your gun is always loaded, even if you cleared it and the safety is on, so barrels don’t get pointed at anything you don’t want to die”.
This still applies here, but the situation had nothing to do with teaching a kid. Now that kid is dead. So fucked…
WTF
That is like teaching fire safety by pouring gasoline on someone and waving a lit match.
There is no lesson. Just a sociopath murdering a child.
I hate headlines like this that use quotes that diminish how serious it is. How can a journalist,in good faith, write what they did about the incident, things like putting the gun against her chest, and then still have a headline like that. You just know a bunch of people are just going to read the headline and think it’s another accident when this had far more malice.
According to a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation arrest warrant obtained by HuffPost, Runions told police that she had taken a 9 mm handgun out of its case, removed the magazine and called Evangaline over to “show her firearm safety.” Runions pressed the barrel of the gun against the child’s chest and pulled the trigger, police said she told them. Daniels told police that she saw Runions take out the gun, remove its magazine and put it to Evangaline’s chest, but she turned away and didn’t see her pull the trigger, according to the warrant. The 7-year-old girl told authorities that she saw Runions shoot Evangaline and said the bullet struck a glass bottle, sending shards her way, according to the warrant.
wtf
It is too easy to get a driver’s license in the US and sure is hell way too easy to get a gun. Some people can’t be trusted with a toothbrush.
The US is seriously self-destructing in so many ways.
