A Liberal
Dose
April 27,
2023
Troy D.
Smith
“Shot for
getting the wrong address- what is happening?”
In about one week’s time, there have been FOUR national news
stories about people making simple mistakes and being shot by paranoid people
with guns. In Kansas City, a black teenager with a sterling reputation is sent
to pick his little brothers up from a sleepover. He gets the address confused
and rings the wrong person’s doorbell. The door is answered by an 85-year-old
white man with a gun, who shoots the boy in the head then, as he is lying on
the porch, opens the door and shoots him again. The boy manages to run away and
goes to multiple neighbors seeking help, none of whom will open their door,
until someone finally calls 911. He is alive now, but missing brain tissue.
In Texas, a group of teenaged girls returning from
cheerleading practice stopped at a convenience store… one of them accidentally
got in the wrong car. She immediately got out and got into the car with her
friends… but the driver of the car she’d accidentally gotten into, a
25-year-old Latino man, fired into the car as it left, shooting the girl in the
back and leg.
In Upstate New York, a group of young people looking for a
friend’s house got lost and pulled into the wrong driveway. As they were
backing out, the 65-year-old homeowner came onto the porch and started shooting
at the car, killing a 20-year-old young woman (everyone in this story, so far
as I know, was white).
In Florida, two African Americans making a grocery delivery for
Instacart accidentally pulled into the driveway next door. The homeowner sent
his 12-year-old out to tell them to get off his property. They started pulling
out when the homeowner, hearing his son yelling, ran out with a gun and got
close enough that the scared Instacart driver ran over his foot. The
45-year-old homeowner then fired three shots at the car. In this case,
fortunately, the man’s foot was the only injury.
What the heck is going on in this country?
That is a valid question and one that needs addressing.
Some of these incidents may have had a racial component. In
fact, Kansas City police have stated that to be the case. Maybe we should talk
about the elements of our country’s history that make some white people feel
inordinately threatened by the presence of a black person. But wait, I forgot,
we’re in a red state and that is practically illegal. Our General Assembly is
much more concerned with banning books, defunding libraries, and dictating how
(or whether) teachers can talk about race.
Some of these cases have no racial component. Some would say it calls for more gun control
-but, in these cases, I don’t think that’s the issue. Three of the four cases
involved homeowners with handguns to protect those homes, which I am foursquare
in favor of, and not weapons of mass killing being deployed against the public.
My conservative friends say it is not a gun issue, it is a people issue -and,
in these cases, at least, I agree with them. But where does the sudden spike in
paranoia come from? The Kansas City man’s own family says he has been
increasingly radicalized by conservative media- and I’ve seen it happen to my
own loved ones. People who never even owned guns in the prime of their life
now, in their old age, afraid to go to the supermarket without three or four
guns on them… because they are being lied to, over and over, about alleged
“carnage in the streets”. Case in point: recent news that our own local
representative’s campaign is telling people the peaceful -ANTI-GUN -protesters
in Nashville were arrested for having pipe bombs, a flat out lie. Lies like
that are intended to stir up the base… but it is stirring them up in the wrong
way, and the carnage talk becomes self-fulfilling.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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