Shocker: 8-year-old girl tells 11-year-old neighbour he can't play with her puppy, he shoots her dead

Tennessee: An 11-year-old boy has been charged with murder after he killed his 8-year-old neighbor, police said, and witnesses say it was because the girl wouldn’t let him see her puppy. Police were called to the neighborhood in White Pine, east of Knoxville, on Saturday night. The boy shot the girl from inside his home with his father’s 12-gauge shotgun, said Jefferson County Sheriff Bud McCoig. Latasha Dyer told reporters her daughter was playing outside when the next-door neighbor asked to see the puppy. McKayla told the boy “no,” and he shot her, Dyer said. A neighbor, Misty Edwards, said her niece was playing with the girl and saw what happened. [caption id=“attachment_2458470” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] “She was a precious little girl. She was a mommy’s girl. No matter how bad of a mood you were in she could always make you smile,” Dyer told the station. “I want her back in my arms.” The sheriff would not discuss the motive with media, and the sheriff’s office did not immediately return messages from The Associated Press. This comes less than a week after the Oregon shootout where a 20-year-old gunman killed at least 9 people at Umpqua Community College. Although separate incidents, the common thread that links shootings in America is the shockingly easy access to guns across the country. A grim President Barack Obama said after the Oregon bloodbath that the U.S. has “become numb” to shootings. Obama challenged voters wanting to deal with the problem to vote for elected officials who agree with that priority. He has had no success through his nearly seven years in the White House in getting Congress to tighten laws involving firearms. The president noted that this wasn’t his first appearance before reporters to pass on his condolences to the families and friends of the fallen in mass shootings. These incidents have become embedded in the life of America. Over the past several years, Obama has traveled to Aurora, Colorado; Tucson, Arizona; Charleston, South Carolina, and many other cities to mourn victims of gun violence. The president has sought changes in the nation’s gun laws, though it’s unclear at this initial stage of the investigation whether the changes often proposed — such as expanded background checks, stricter magazine limits and an assault weapons ban — would have prevented Thursday’s massacre in Oregon. “It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun,” Obama said. The White House’s failed push for gun control legislation after the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, shooting — in which 20 children and six adults were killed at an elementary school — deeply frustrated Obama. With little change in Washington’s political dynamic, he hasn’t made a concerted effort to renew the gun control effort. He said he cannot do it by himself. “I’d ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change these laws and to save lives and to let young people grow up, and that will require a change of politics on this issue,” Obama said. Obama said there is a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in the U.S. He asked how anyone with a straight face can make the argument that more guns will make people safer. “I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure as president to offer my condolences to families in these circumstances,” Obama said. “But based on my experience as president, I can’t guarantee that. And that’s terrible to say.” With inputs from AP