When you're a parent, you want to foster your child's interests, at least to some degree. After all, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who saw their kid writing a poem and imagining them as the Poet Laureate of the United States, or took them to their first soccer practice and imagined them playing in the World Cup. You want to foster these passions because, if nothing else, it's good for them.
But as parents, we should draw the line at when it's not. Otherwise, you might just be enabling them down the wrong path, like one dad in Connecticut seems to have done.
A Mansfield man arrested earlier this month after police say they found explosives in his home during a search is the son of a former University of Connecticut professor charged more than a decade ago with providing him with chemicals for bomb-making.
Connecticut State Police arrested Aleksi Javanainen, 30, on Oct. 3 and charged him with illegal possession of explosives and illegal bomb manufacturing, both felonies, as well as three misdemeanor counts of first-degree reckless endangerment.
His lawyer did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Javanainen's father, Juha Javanainen, was arrested in 2010 after his then-13-year-old son detonated a homemade bomb in the family's backyard, the Hartford Courant reported, citing his arrest warrant. The teen's mother called police and said she wanted the boy to stop blowing up things, the Courant reported. Juha Javanalnen was out of the home at the time, but heard the blast along with neighbors, the newspaper reported.
It seems Dad bought the materials for Aleksi, who went into great detail with him at the time, telling him all about how he was interested in chemistry and had blown stuff up with it.
He went to juvenile court at the time, but clearly, reform didn't happen.
Allegedly.
Juhan Javanainen is listed as a professor emeritus, meaning he likely retired from UCONN. Apparently, enabling your then 13-year-old son to potentially blow up the neighborhood is not disqualifying for work in the physics department.
The fact that a lot of his publications deal with nuclear physics doesn't exactly make me feel warm and tingly about his son being really into blowing stuff up, if we're being honest.
It's just weird that there were 16 years between arrests, father and now son, both now charged with stuff related to bombs.
Don't get me wrong, blowing stuff up can be pretty cool, and I don't think we should have to jump through licenses in order to do so. However, the law is what it is and it's just one of those strange stories we come across that deals with crime.
And the fact is that if this guy can manufacture his own explosives, despite all of the laws and controls meant to prevent that, how do they think they're going to keep one of at least 400 million firearms out of the hands of some gang-banger in Chicago who has the money and the connections to get one?
If we can't stop people from making bombs, there's not much hope of getting them to stop trading guns illegally.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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