Recently in my local area a carload of gangstas unloaded some bullets on a rival gangsta, but they ended up instead killing a 7-year-old girl. The gun that did the killing was handed to the shooter by a 16-year-old girl who said she was "tired of being disrespected." Get out the shootin' arn, Ma...I'm bein' disrespected!" If disrespect is grounds for murder then we'll all be dead sooner or later. Who hasn't disrespected someone else?
In such a culture, where lack of respect gets the death penalty, it's not hard to believe that these youngsters are ready to kill, and to die, for something as trivial as the way people have treated each other since the first ape dissed that second ape. In the old days people fought duels over insults, now the "duels" are fought from the open windows of cars.
...and about cars, and before gun owners start writing me about being anti-gun, which I'm not (I'm anti-murder), there has always been this argument that gun owners make: "If guns kill people and you ban guns, cars also kill people so ban cars!" That would be difficult to do, because we depend on cars in a way we don't depend on guns, and also we rate things by their utility. Cars, baseball bats, hammers, kitchen knives, et al., can be used to kill, but that isn't why they were designed. On the other hand, except for shooting targets, animals and people, it's hard to think of another use for a gun. Their main purpose of existence is to kill. If the 16-year-old girl in the gangsta car had handed the murderer a baseball bat or a kitchen knife or a hammer, knowing he was going to kill somebody with it, then yes, she's also guilty of murder. If she'd handed him a baseball bat and said, "Knock that ball over the fence!" or a hammer and said, "Put another nail in the fence; that board is coming off," and he used the object to kill someone then that would be a whole different matter.
Years ago in the context of the then-current Columbine High shootings I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper saying just those things. I added, "No one has ever driven into a school in a car and deliberately tried to run people down and kill them." Ah, never say never. I got an anonymous letter containing a photocopy marked FYI, of an incident just as I described as having never happened. The photocopy of the news story told how a person took his car onto a school playground and deliberately tried to kill some kids. The person who sent the photocopy missed the point of my letter, which was that the car wasn't designed to kill people, even though it could be used that way. It's a good thing, too, because cars are frightening enough, especially on the freeway in the morning, heading into work. It's scary watching people talk on their cell phones, put on makeup or read their newspapers while driving 70 mph. I want to holler bloody murder when I see it, and it's probably lucky I don't carry a gun or I might just start blasting away at such clods. That would be justifiable homicide, wouldn't it? People acting so cavalierly about driving at high speeds is surely disrespect of their fellow humans at some level.
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