Three Minors Murder an Australian Man in Oklahoma Because They Were "Bored"

The event increases criticism of the United States’ gun culture in Australia, where the victim was from.

The astonishment caused by the murder this Monday of an Australian college student by three minors in Oklahoma, simply because “they were bored,” has made an impression in Australia. Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer has criticized the National Rifle Association (NRA) and has asked his fellow Australians to stop travelling to the United States as a form of pressure to force Congress to impose greater gun control laws. However, the spokesperson for the White House, claiming not to have known about the event, did not want to voice an opinion about the murder after being questioned at a press conference by a journalist from Fox television, which has claimed that in the case of the murder of the young African-American Trayvon Martin, the presidency did have a lot to say.

The circumstances of the death of the student in Oklahoma and those of Martin, who was taken down by a volunteer security guard in Florida last year, are completely different, beyond the fact that the three minors who ended the young Australian’s life are African-American and Martin — in his case the victim, not the executioner — was as well. His murder unleashed the immediate outrage of the black community, which condemned the racial prejudice behind the event. So far, this recent death has only inspired society’s bewilderment at its trivial motive, boredom, which is very far from the hatred of any minority.

Last Monday, Chancey Allen Luna, 16, James Francis Edwards, 15, and Michael Dewayne Jones, 17, decided to take the car and “kill someone for the fun of it,” as Jones confessed to the police. Minutes later, while they drove through a neighborhood of Duncan, in southern Oklahoma, they spotted Christopher Lane, 22, jogging. “There’s our target.” Luna shot him in the back with a .22 caliber revolver, and they immediately fled the scene.

Three hours later, the police found them in the car playing with the weapon. “We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody,” Jones confessed to the officers. The authorities believe that, if they hadn’t been arrested, they would have continued killing people at random for fun.

This Tuesday, Luna and Edwards were accused of two counts of homicide in the first degree and will be tried as adults, in accordance with Oklahoma law. Jones has been charged as an accessory. All three are in prison; only Jones has been offered bail, set at $1 million. The minors are no strangers to the police. On the day of the murder, Edwards had been in court signing some documents related to his parole.

Lane was studying at East Central University in Ada, about 60 miles from where he was killed, thanks to a scholarship from the university’s baseball program, a sport for which he had given up soccer. It’s expected that, in the next few hours, his body will be returned to Australia, where his death has inflamed the passions of various politicians.

“Tourists thinking of going to the U.S. should think twice,” Fischer said to the Melbourne newspaper, The Herald Sun. “This is the bitter harvest and legacy of the policies of the NRA that even blocked background checks for people buying guns. I am deeply angry about what happened in Oklahoma because of the callous attitude of the three teenagers (but) it’s a sign of the proliferation of guns on the ground in the U.S.,” laments the Australian ex-prime minister.