American political culture has a strong vein of demanding everyone be “tough on crime”, in the entirely mistaken belief that crime comes from not being harsh enough in sentencing. We also know that eleven year olds aren’t fully competent adults and we have carve outs in juvenile law that reflect that obvious truth. The intersection of these two facts means that charging decisions on cases like the above depend as much on what the actual right way to charge is as they do on how much what the kid did frightens the general public. What that tends to end in is laws that say you can only charge a minor as an adult in exceptional cases and then a push to make every minor charged with a violent crime the exception.