[octothorp]

While a 16 year old typically has moral agency, it's might be relatively new to them in terms of real-world decision-making. If they end up in a drug and gang lifestyle by that early age, it's possible (I'd argue even likely) that they did not have a well-developed moral agency during many of the events and choices that led them to that point in time. When did they get involved in that lifestyle? At 14? at 10? To what degree were those choices, and did they have moral agency then? To what degree were those early choices made on moral grounds?

There are a lot of kids growing up in environments where the moral decisions they are faced with are way more complicated, with far higher stakes, than anything I (and I imagine most of us) had to deal with when I was young. I think it's really problematic to try and label anything as more or less of a tragedy, or even weigh moral culpability, when we're talking even about teenagers. They might have moral agency, but they still have the potential to be tied up in situations either beyond their control or situations caused by choices they made before they had moral agency.