Three adolescents set out to kill a man. And they did. The victim – a young Australian student and baseball player named Christopher Lane – was not known to them. One of them, fifteen year old James Edwards, said he did it because he was bored.

Let us now be disputatious, provoking, even – some might think – radical.

We contend that if the bored boy had to work for a living he would not have been bored. If all three boys had to work rather than sit at a school desk and have free “education” poured over them, they would have been too busy to kill.

The struggle to exist is a reason to exist. Socialism, the welfare state, by supplying all the necessities of life, can bring anybody – even the illiterate and non-introspective – to ask “What’s the point of my life?” “What’s it all for?” Or simply, “What can I do to stop being bored?”

Sure, there is a minority who have mental resources enough to keep themselves occupied if all their daily needs are provided. They have interests to pursue. They may be inventive. They set their own purposes and find their personal answers to existential questions.

The rest should invest time and effort in surviving. They’ll know then what their own lives cost, and probably be a lot less likely to hold the lives of others cheap.

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About the mother of one of the killers, information is provided here by Bryan Preston at PJ Media.

Did “bored” teen James Edwards learn about crime from his mother? Edwards is the 15-year-old …  accused of shooting Australian baseball player Chris Lane in the back last Friday. He appeared in court Tuesday and reportedly made a mockery of the proceedings.

A search on Mugshots.com turns up one Brenda M. Edwards, 50, of Stephens County, Oklahoma. I called the Stephens County district attorney’s office today and confirmed that Brenda M. Edwards is James Edwards’ mother.

Edwards is currently incarcerated in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. Her extensive rap sheet begins in 1994 with a conviction for larceny, and spans her son’s entire life.

She has three known aliases. As things stand now, her relationship with Oklahoma’s criminal justice system won’t end for several decades. …

If we’re going to blame a “culture” for James Edwards’ alleged part in Chris Lane’s murder, as some want to blame the so-called “gun culture”,* shouldn’t the culture of recidivist criminality come under scrutiny?

And wasn’t Brenda Edwards paid by the state to have a child whom she couldn’t otherwise have afforded?

And hasn’t the welfare state taken on the guardianship of children, providing them with everything from housing and food to schooling and health care?

The Left sometimes characterizes the political philosophy of the Right as “Devil take the hindmost”. Today we feel that, speaking for ourselves, they are not entirely wrong.

* A few days later two teenage boys beat to death an old man – Delbert Belton, 88 – in a car park in Spokane, Washington. Belton should have been armed with a gun.