Empty Words
Ever knock on the wrong door? How about knocking on the wrong door and being met with a gun? I heard about such a story, and it is outrageous that a child would be presumably dangerous to anyone. I don’t know how a person can mistake an innocent knock for a dangerous event. This is equivalent to a bird landing on its feeder but getting snatched by a larger bird.
I may not understand why the man shot the child who knocked on the wrong door looking for his siblings. But I sure as heck won’t forget that it happened because this event could have happened to me or one of my friend’s children. The fact is people are too quick to call someone they don’t understand a dangerous image. We don’t understand it, so it must be a threat. What we don’t understand should be studied and thought about. That way, we don’t make any misconceptions about the people around us.
When you accidentally knock on the wrong door, it is a mistake. Not a fatal one usually. But for this boy, it was fatal. I am still stumbling over the fact that such an innocent life was taken way too soon. The boy’s name is Ralph Yarl, who was only 16 and ended up on the wrong street when trying to pick up his siblings. I can’t fathom what would entice someone to consider a child as harmful. But then, I guess some people have misconceptions because of race. Hey, wait, did I forget to mention I dislike the use of the word Race to describe a person?
There are always two sides to every story. But to be honest, I don’t want to try to justify a person taking another’s life for as simple as knocking on the wrong door. Heck, what if it was Girl Scouts trying to sell their cookies? The event is done, and the result is set in stone. But it still bothers me that RACE is preemptively a reason to decide if someone is dangerous, innocent, or automatically suspicious.
But this isn’t the end of the random killings that we have seen in the past three weeks. It may sound crazy, but another incident occurred not too long after Ralph. This one involved a twenty-year-old girl who was with a friend in upstate New York. They ended up in the wrong driveway. Wrong place at the wrong time. She was shot by a man on his porch. This was not an incident where RACE mattered, but non the same, it was a person who inadvertently thought of harming another human for the simplest of motivations. Motivations like protecting their property ( which the girl was not harming anything of his), may have been accident ( but really, who shoots birds off a porch), and lastly because he felt threatened. Her name was Kaylin Gillis.
After these two events happened, I wondered why people are so trigger-happy lately. A young 12-year-old girl got shot in New Haven, CT, by a drive-by. I am not one that believes guns should be used so lightly. I believe we do not bring a knife to a gunfight. But also, I think guns shouldn’t be used carelessly. Guns can kill, and they are scary to those of us who do not own them. I am more afraid of a gun than a grizzly bear.
In fact, my state has seen headway of terrible events that involve guns. From the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting to the Griswald home invasion, where the home was lit on fire because of a deal gone wrong by a young boy. For me, I find guns to be problematic because they are easy tools to kill someone. But that is just me after seeing multiple accounts of people who are trigger-happy or on a mission to destroy others’ lives.
What do you think about guns?
