Everyone has made the same error at some point: looking for an address and accidentally ending up at the wrong door. The moment of awkwardness is usually forgotten quickly. For 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, it was her last memory before being gunned down by 65-year-old Kevin Monahan after she and some friends accidentally turned into his driveway in upstate Washington County.
The killing came just two days after 84-year-old Andrew Lester shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in Kansas City after the teen accidentally went to the wrong address; fortunately, Yarl survived and is recovering. The thing about a society awash in guns is not only that so many people are armed, but they assume everyone else is armed, too, creating a disturbing loop of aggression as presumptive self-defense. The fear that the other person will draw first motivates people to fire their weapons at innocent strangers.
That tinderbox is then doused in gasoline by a certain slice of the media and the political establishment that depends on fostering paranoia, convincing large swaths of the public not only that they need guns but have to be constantly prepared to use them against a sinister world populated by ever-shifting enemies. In that light, any passerby looks foreboding.
What’s the pro-gun solution, then? Have everyone approach every front door locked and loaded on the off chance that they’ll have to return fire from an overzealous homeowner? Body armor and ballistic helmets for all? There’s nothing here that doesn’t quickly stray into outright absurdity, and everyone knows it.
There’s no real defense to mount, so the same tired soundbites are trotted out: these incidents weren’t about the guns, and would have been the same without them. It’s a treatment that no other product receives. If a drunk driver kills a pedestrian, no one argues it would have been the same had he taken the train instead. An insecure Monahan, armed with a baseball bat, would not have killed Gillis, period. Yet the gun cult demands we live in unreality, and so the lead will keep flying.
