How old do you have to be, to be responsible? Depends on what it is we are talking about. The drinking age is 21 in the United States. This is more about development of the brain. It should actually be 25. Your brain is then sufficiently developed to be more resistance against addiction. To serve in the military, you have to be 18. Of course they don’t drink in the military. Yeah, right. To be punished as an adult, you only have to be 16. (Or do you?) Between 2013-2018 some 30,467 children below the age of 10 were arrested. Some 266,327 kids between 10-12 were arrested in that same time frame. In England and Wales, criminal responsibility is age 10. In Scotland it is 8 (They grow up fast in Scotland, my ancestral home). In 34 US states, there is no minimum age for delinquency, while most others, it is 10. 24 states have no minimum age to transfer delinquency cases to adult criminal court. Just to put into perspective those arrest numbers above, they are out of a total arrest number of 7.8 million, just in 2018.
But one has to look at some of the justification for those arrests. One 10 year old with autism was hiding himself in the closet at class and did not want to get out. He became violent with the teacher when she tried. One 7 year old was playing with his food. A 6 year old was arrested in school for a tantrum. A 10 year old was arrested playing dodgeball, because he threw a ball at one kid’s face. Another 7 year old refused to go to the principal. This shows that teachers are either worried about getting sued, or poor training on their part. One shudders to think, what would happen if these teachers began using guns as some politicians have suggested. Crazy.