Two who wish the bullets would go back in the guns

Those gun cases that require your fingerprints before opening seem like a great idea for those wanting a weapon in their home, but maybe they should be engineered to also give this electronic message when opened: “Warning! You may spend a lifetime dealing with the consequences of what you are about to do.”

Jamia Boyd needed that warning. Quantez Jones apparently did, too.

Boyd will spend about five years in state prison because she took a gun to a fist fight. She was upset her child was attacked at a bus stop. A month later on April 26, 2016, she went to a park to confront the other child’s mother and turned the fist fight into a gun attack. She shot two people, but not the other mother with whom she had the problem.

Poor judgment became criminal, and from most accounts was an anomaly in an otherwise peaceful, normal life. Her desire to protect her child was twisted into something that will take her away from that child, her husband and the rest of the family. It was a fluke that her shots did not take a life or two.

Jones was a teen on Nov. 29 doing exceptionally stupid teen things, firing at a house in Belleville. Then somehow he turned the gun on the teen-aged friend who had given him the weapon, Deveon Hunt.

Hunt is dead. Jones faces a future drastically reshaped by a one-second action in his young life.

There’s no “undo” button next to a trigger.

This story was originally published January 11, 2018 at 4:30 PM with the headline "Two who wish the bullets would go back in the guns."