A 25-year-old Missouri man says he mistook his mother for an intruder before shooting her to death at their home’s back door.
Prosecutors have charged Jaylen Johnson with manslaughter and armed criminal action in connection with the shooting death on Thursday of his mother, Monica McNichols-Johnson.
McNichols-Johnson’s shooting death came less than a year after another shooting in Missouri saw Ralph Yarl, then 16, get shot on 13 April by 84-year-old Andrew Lester after ringing the wrong doorbell while picking up his siblings.
While most gun owners are not insane nut jobs, the actual problem people are trying to point out is that everyone acts in poor judgement or overwhelming emotion sometimes. I might swear loudly at myself; someone having a loaded gun handy might end someone’s life. There’s a difference.
The other issue that people don’t talk enough about is the inherent conflict between keeping a deadly weapon secured and keeping one ready for defense.
I think the world might be better if we stopped pretending we’re all exactly the same.
Thankfully, you must be wrong, or with 600,000,000+ guns for 300,000,000+ people we’d all already be dead.
But it’s not as simple as whether we’re all the same. Owning a deadly weapon means that anything going wrong potentially kills someone. Most of the time they didn’t deserve it.
You’re afraid of a threat that magnified by your fears and misperceptions. I’m afraid of your “self-defense” or your lack of securing your weapon.
Be different all you want, but it’s a problem when it kills innocent people. Where are their rights?
“Most of the time they didn’t deserve it” eh?
Well, all gun deaths per year including accidents, murder, and suicide, hover around 60,000/yr.
However, even by our most conservative estimate, conservative in this case meaning only using verifiable police reports and completely discounting the most common type of armed defense: defensive display, Harvard has estimated “the good guy with a gun” being effective 100,000 x/yr.
Clearly we can see that 100,000 defensive gun uses is 40,000 more than 60,000. This indicates quite clearly that actually “most” of the time it is deserved, as “most” of the time by 40,000 it is self defense.
You’re afraid of a threat that magnified by your fears and misperceptions
I really hate that I have to say this, but literally no u.
I’m afraid of your “self-defense”
Well don’t attempt to kill me or someone I care about in my presence, simple as. Think you can handle that? Should be pretty damn easy tbh.
or your lack of securing your weapon.
Well don’t make people leave them in the car to come into your store, the only time mine are less secure than I’d like are when the law requires it to be.
Be different all you want, but it’s a problem when it kills innocent people.
If a man is stabbed in the park do you feel guilty for having knives in the kitchen? Unless I’m the one who does the bad thing I will not feel responsible for it, I am not responsible for the actions of another sentient being.
Where are their rights?
They have them. Just because rape exists, do you think a woman has no right to her body? Similarly, just because murder exists, that doesn’t mean the murderer wasn’t trampling the murdered’s rights, actually that’s literally the exact reason murder is called “a crime.” And the reason legal self defense is a thing, too, your right to self defense is to secure your right to life, specifically.
