You Can’t Just Shoot People
Bearing arms is a right in America. But just feeling scared doesn’t give anyone a license to kill.
Owning one comes with responsibilities.
Photographer: Jon Cherry/Bloomberg
Some things should hardly need saying. It’s not ethical or legal to shoot someone for ringing your doorbell. Or leaving your driveway. Or rolling a basketball into your yard. Or accidentally getting into your car before quickly leaving it.
In recent days, more than half a dozen Americans have been shot for precisely those reasons. The alleged perpetrators were black, Latino and white, and the victims came from a variety of backgrounds, too. The shootings happened in blue states and red, in urban areas and rural. But they shared a common denominator: the dangerously wrong idea that people can fire their guns whenever they feel frightened, or even just annoyed.