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.
Did you have a child die screaming and terrified on their classroom floor at the hands of a legal gun owner? Were you ever hunted in a mall by a teenage extremist with a semi-automatic rifle?
Actually fuck it, did you even shoot the “armed men” or dog-sized bear, or did it turn out you didn’t even need your guns in the bullshit you just made up.
That’s very clearly not true.
Believe it or not, this is not the first time on Lemmy someone has justified owning a gun to protect themselves from bears.
And this statistic still stands:
There have been 67 fatal black bear attacks (and they would be the only ones small enough to come through a dog door) in North America since 1900. Most of them were defensive attacks.
https://wiseaboutbears.org/about-us/bear-attacks-2/
There’s a very easy thing to do if there’s a bear in your house that doesn’t involve shooting it- leave and call animal control.
It also means you don’t have to get rid of a bear carcass and clean bear blood off the carpet.
Isn’t it funny how they always have this self-aggrandizing reasons for owning a gun? They’re always “defending their family” (until their child uses their gun to blow their brains out) or “preventing tyranny” (when they’re not enthusiastically voting and funding fascists).
It’s never just “I own guns because they’re fun”, it’s always the hero fantasy. I guess if they were honest, we wouldn’t tolerate the endless bullshit they cause.
There are gun owners who just say, “I own guns because I think they’re cool” or whatever. I’ve met them before. I even have a friend like that. He’s fine with gun regulations, he just thinks guns are cool and (before he moved out of California), he liked to go out to the desert and shoot cans. He had no hero fantasies. He didn’t even keep his guns easily-accessible. I have a lot more respect for people like him.
I know they exist (because I’ve also known them) but you’ll never find one on the internet because the more horrific the social cost of American gun laws grows, the more grandiose the justifications for doing nothing need to be.
Imagine telling victims of gun violence “sorry, we can’t make a token efforts to make sure gun owners aren’t unhinged domestic abusers because some people think guns are fun and we don’t want to inconvenience them”.
We’d have gun regulations in a heartbeat if these “problem pretending to be the solution” gun owners were honest about why they want guns and when they’d use them – it’s why they lie about it in the first place.
I wonder if the armed men looked anything like this.