Mass shootings are old news. The new trend in gun-crazy America is shooting total strangers because they knock on your door, turn around in your driveway or mistake your car for theirs.
The root cause of both: the NRA bought the Republican Party and the Supreme Court to rewrite the Constitution, and Fox News volunteered its services to convince half the population that everybody is out to get them.
We’ll start with Heather Roth, a teenage Texas cheerleader who opened the door to a car in a supermarket parking lot that she and her teammates used as a carpool lot, thinking the car was hers, before seeing Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., 25, sitting in the passenger seat.
She initially panicked, thinking there was a stranger in her car, and got back into a friend’s vehicle.
The natural response to this in stand your ground America is to open fire, right?
“I see the guy get out of the passenger door, and I rolled my window down, and I was trying to apologize to him,” Roth said. “And then halfway, my window was down, and he just threw his hands up, and then he pulled out a gun, and he just started shooting at all of us.”
Roth and one of her teammates in the Woodland Elite Cheer Company, Payton Washington, were struck by the gunfire.
Roth wasn’t seriously injured, but Washington was shot in the leg and in the back, suffering damage to multiple organs.
Next up is Kaylin Gillis, who was in a car with friends in upstate New York trying to locate the house of another friend in a rural area.
The group realized they were lost and were turning around in a driveway when the owner of the home at the end of the driveway, Kevin Monahan, 65, opened fire on the vehicle, striking Gillis, who died minutes later.
“This is a very sad case,” Washington County Sheriff Jeffrey Murphy said. “There was no reason for Mr. Monahan to feel threatened, especially as it appears the vehicle was leaving at the time.”
The lawyer for this Monahan guy, who has been charged with second-degree murder, sounds like an NRA shill, defending his client in an interview with a local TV station by putting it out there that “it is way too soon to be pronouncing guilt and be pronouncing what someone is thinking, and whether they were entitled to feel fear, or whether they weren’t.”
Left unsaid there is that feeling fear at a vehicle turning around in your driveway doesn’t give you the right to fire into the vehicle, any more than whatever the guy in Texas was thinking had the right to fire into a car full of teenage cheerleaders.
Or the guy in Kansas City had the right to shoot the kid who knocked on his door.
That man, Andrew Lester, 84, shot Ralph Yarl, 16, who had knocked on Lester’s door last Thursday night, thinking he was at the residence where his two younger brothers were visiting with friends.
No words were exchanged, according to the probable-cause affidavit in the case.
Lester, a White man, who told police that he thought Yarl, a Black teen, was trying to break into his home, just opened fire, because of course that’s what you do in that situation.
A kid knocks on your door, you shoot him; a car turns around in your driveway, you shoot into it; a cheerleader opens the door to your car, you get out and shoot up the car she’s in.
This is the America the NRA, the Republican Party and Fox News has made for us; we just get to live in it.
Until, that is, we’re the one who knocks on the wrong door, gets lost in a rural area, runs into the wrong guy in a supermarket parking lot.
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Chris Graham
