Thursday, April 20, 2023
Political Mayhem Thursday: The Shooters
In a bizarre new twist in America's love affair with guns, three incidents in the last few days have revolved around people gunning down someone who just happens to be in the wrong place.
Shown above is the upstate New York driveway where a 65-year-old named Kevin Monahan shot dead Kaylin Gillis after she and some friends drove up his driveway by mistake as they looked for a friend's house. Monahan fired away with a shotgun as the young women tried to leave the property.
Meanwhile, in Missouri, 85-year-old Andrew Lester shot through his front door and killed Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old child who was trying to pick up his siblings and went to the wrong house.
And in Texas, two young cheerleaders were shot when they mistakenly approached the wrong car in a parking lot.
This ethic of firing away as a first resort when any kind of threat is perceived is the culmination of several threads within our culture, forming a toxic rope. The first is the idea that guns are the solution to crime. The truth is that they are more often the cause of crime. The second is that violent crime is out of control, and we are all under constant threat of attack. That's just not true-- violent crime is down, not up, this year-- and even when crime is relatively high any one of us is usually at pretty low risk.
I've told the story before about my dad: when we lived on the East Side of Detroit in the late 1960's and many in the neighborhood got guns out of fear, my dad got a trombone. He did not know how to play the trombone. It doesn't make much sense-- but it makes a lot more sense than getting a gun and shooting at whoever comes on your property.
