A Black teen, Ralph Yarl (16) went to pick up some siblings at a house in Kansas City. He knocked on the door. It was the incorrect home - his siblings were not there. The homeowner shot him through the window. Then he shot Yarl a second time.
Somehow, Yarl survived. Police responded to the gunshot reports and got treatment for Yarl. The homeowner is already out of jail, pending more evidence. Oh, the homeowner is white.
Absolutely tragic case. I’m mostly posting a thread on it because I want to be reminded to keep up with the case. Will Yarl recover? Will the homeowner go to jail? How does this happen? Why does everything suck so bad?
The kid was a section leader in band, and on the Science Olympiad team. This is the kind of kid I was. This kid was helping out his family, and paid a huge price, because of guns. Goddammit.
Is merely being on someone’s property enough to trigger self-defense laws in Missouri? I thought the person has to actually demonstrate that they pose some form of threat.
Sitting here watching the reactions to the Jayland Walker case here in Akron. Unarmed Black man shot 46 times by police last fall. The 8 officers involved will not be charged.
When people on this board argue against any kind of sane gun control this is what they are ok with, black kids shot in the head for knocking on a white man’s door. That is the price of their gun fetish and they are fine with it.
I am sick to my stomach about this. I saw the story on the evening news and it was a struggle not to start crying. What is wrong with a person that they would react this way to a person of color knocking on their front door? Clearly the media and certain politicians have succeeded in creating such a climate of fear toward “the other” that some white people think this is the default reaction. We are fucked.
Gun fetishists like this shooter fantasize about the moment when they might get to actually kill a person with their beloved guns. They don’t, during their fantasy, picture a white person.
When this young man walked up to the shooter’s door, all of his fantasy and NRA-fueled paranoia kicked in.
His only thought was probably “This is my lucky day.”
I’ll bet a milliontrillion dollars that he had that shitty SYG insurance.
I mean, there’s going to be a trial, and it’s inevitably going to go up a chain of appeals, and so on. The law is clear, but the defendant will try to claim that he wasn’t actually the shooter, or Yarl did something threatening other than just knocking on his door, or that he was mentally impaired, or whatever, and then a jury will have to evaluate those claims, and so on. It takes time, possibly more time than this guy has left.
Gun rights advocates will often mention as an argument that guns are important to allow someone old and frail to equalize their chances.
However the irrational absolutists among them will not want something like loss of judgment/faculties to be counted as a “red flag”.
My take, contrary to Sicks_Ate , is probably this fellow was not necessarily sating some “shrink, I wanna kill” blood thirst boner, but rather was whipped into a paranoid panic by RW media and social feeds, saw the black guy coming to the door and was “OMG Mildred, this is it they’re coming for us!!!” and Mildred was lucky to not get hit while at it.
I think you got it @Chronos. I just watched the Mayor of KC, Quinton Lucas, being interviewed. He said he has read the charging statement and the most heinous part to him is that the defendant stated to police that he shot because he was scared by the black teenager at his door. Not because Ralph did or said anything threatening, but because he simply existed while being black.
As I said above, we are fucked. Fear and hatred of the “other” appears to be the norm in parts of our country, if not everywhere in the U.S.