The case of Marcus "Mojo" Ursery, 17, is the St. Louis conundrum in a nutshell. The city's exploding street crime problem has lots to do with teenagers running around stealing cars and going on joy rides or doing the dirty work for street gangs. They are immersed in all the trappings of an adult crime world, complete with guns that make it far too easy for them to kill before they've thought through the consequences. And the guns are made far too easily available to them because of the Missouri Legislature's insistence that children not be deprived of their Second Amendment rights.

At age 14, Ursery got ahold of a gun and got into an argument back in 2020 with his friend, Timothy Lucas. Ursery shot and killed Lucas. And because Ursery was handling a gun and making adult decisions with it when he shot Lucas, he now must pay an adult price: 20 years in prison.

The sentence is so harsh, even the prosecutor was arguing against it. Some St. Louisans who are fed up with all the crime and killings might be thinking that State Judge Rex Burlison was absolutely right to send a strong message to youths everywhere with this sentence. But it misses the entire point: Kids that age do not think through the consequences before acting impulsively. The next kid, holding a gun and faced with an intense, confrontational situation, is highly unlikely to think about what happened to Ursery and then decide not to pull the trigger. The next kid is highly unlikely to have read the newspaper or watched the local television news to even know about this sentence.

Thinking that a harsh sentence like this will serve as a lesson is an adult misconception of how a young person's brain works. It isn't always rational. It is highly impulsive. And when a gun is introduced into that mix, really bad things are almost certain to happen. The solution isn't the sentencing; it's the guns.

As the Post-Dispatch's Katie Kull reports, Ursery did little to advance his own cause. A panel tried to interview him for a state program that offered counseling, job training and life skills — in which participation could have helped reduce his sentence. But he wouldn't cooperate. He had a hard time opening up to strangers and talking about his own troubled upbringing, including his own father's murder.

Missouri Republican lawmakers who have been weighing a takeover of the St. Louis police department and circuit attorney's office might think of Burlison as their kind of guy to get tough on youth crime. But they need to own their own role in this outcome for having made guns so easy for kids like Ursery to access.

One life is gone, and another will be wasted in prison. That's a tragedy, not a lesson.

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