Deciding Which Is Which

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN good guys and bad guys can be and often is vague, murky, subtle, difficult to determine. After all, all of us contain elements of both, if we are honest about it. Most of us are basically "good", but all of us embody a nearly limitless number of traits and behavioral characteristics, not all of them good. And that is precisely the problem with this simplistic, misguided conservative gun policy which encourages law abiding citizens, "good" people, to legally own firearms to protect society against the "bad" guys. The problem is our inability to determine for certain exactly who the good guys are. Good guys make mistakes, misuse firearms, and when they do, they become, in effect, bad guys, shooting somebody who didn't really need to be shot, by which time its too late to undo their damage. In just this past week an eighty four year old good guy shot and killed an sixteen year old African-American teenager who knocked on his door mistakenly. The boy was intending to pick up some other kids at an address called "Maple Street", but instead went to "Maple Avenue", which cost him his life. In another similar incident a young white woman was shot and killed because she knocked on the wrong door, at the wrong address. And then there is this headline: "Home Depot Worker shot to death in California while trying to Stop a Shoplifter". Now, arbuably, obviously, an employe has a right, indeed an obligation, to try to stop shoplifters, preferaby by calling the police. But the police take a few minutes to arrive, so oftern the employee must try to detain or delay the culprit from leaving the premises. However, we now live in an age in which shoplifters are increasingly likely to carry firearms, just as members of society generally are. Then too, many states have enacted these dubious "stand your ground" laws, which essentially encourage people to take the law into their own hands. The number of good, law abiding citizens who end up killing someone without it being necessary is only going to increase in the futre, and it will be our responsibility as an alleged civilization to decide what to do about it.