The court case for this has been uploaded in the meantime.
Eh, sometimes it is just age - not in Ralph Yarl’s case necessarily or your mother’s. But sometimes. My very left-wing white mother who had been married to a black man (my step-father) and didn’t really watch TV other than movies, towards the end of her life became very paranoid and frightened of what she perceived as generically threatening people. She was often terrified at imagined (as far as I can tell) hints that someone might break into her place and hurt her.
She never owned a gun, was pretty petite and abhorred violence, so she was absolutely no threat to anyone. But mental decline (severe undiagnosed hypertension probably didn’t help here) and recognition of her own increasing fragility fed her fears.
This exactly matches the story in this documentary I saw a few years back:
Just this weekend I was talking to a friend who lived in Kansas City for many years. He said that the most prominent emotion people there have is fear. Fear of their neighbors, fear of other races, fear of people parking in front of their house, etc.
Jordan Klepper goes to a gun show in Oklahoma.
WTF is going on? That’s three completely bonkers shootings in a couple days. The US needs serious gun control as gun owners obviously cannot be trusted with them. Good guys with guns are going going nuts.
I’d hold off judgement on the cheerleader one. Carjacking by teens is very real and the difference with that one is there was actual breaking and entering whereas with the other two, there was no imminent danger at the time.
According to witnesses, she opened the door, saw him, apologized, and it seems she made no further attempt to get in. He physically got out of the car and shot two girls who were in no way threatening him.
A responsible, sane person would not shoot in that situation. Point the gun to scare them off if he legit felt threatened? Perhaps. But fucking shoot them? Come on. This is why we need to better regulate gun ownership. To keep reckless pieces of shit from fantasizing about living in the old west with real fucking guns.
This guy who shot these girls is as much of a cancer on our nation as the guys in KC and NY.
That’s why I said I’d hold off. The article I read said the girls said that with no independent witnesses.
Hold off on having an opinion about a man who shot two teenage girls? No thanks, I’ll have my opinions.
They were shot in their car. How can you do a carjacking from your own car?
That’s not how I’m reading it – it looks like one of the victims mistakenly opened the door to the alleged shooter’s car, thinking it was hers.
From what I read, she then returned to her car, he got out to confront them, they rolled down the window to apologize and he riddled them.
Yes, the news I am reading is they were in their own car when they were both shot. They were not in his car when he shot them both.
Gotcha, I understand what you’re saying now, and I see the apparent series of events described in this WaPo article:
Even if they were car jacking him (which, ffs, they weren’t), I’m of the notion that a car isn’t the same value as a human life. Let them have the car and let the police do their jobs. We should be better than parking lot justice. But now every dipshit with a gun thinks he’s the cop, judge, jury and executioner.
Fuck the NRA.
Sometime in the last year, I was driving my daughter’s Jeep; as I left the convenience store with my purchases, I opened the door to get into the driver’s seat when I noticed the man in the passenger seat… thankfully, he didn’t shoot me, as I was attempting to get into the wrong green Jeep. I apologized, and went and found the right one.
Yeah, no thanks. Fuck that guy, and he’s lucky I’m not dictator.
Some people just have to give the guy with the gun every possible benefit of the doubt. Some need to assume that the people who were shot were lying, that they actually deserved it.
Otherwise, they may need to reexamine some of their positions, and that’s not something likely to happen.
I may be mistaken, but I don’t think that that was what @running_coach was saying. I think he may have been saying “if the alleged shooter pursued the victims to their own car, and then shot them, he was no longer defending himself against what he had perceived to be a carjacking attempt.”