A Black Teenage Boy Shot in "Impulse Shooting"

The shooting of Ralph Yarl, a 16 year old, has become another headline in the tragic, age-old discussion of the American gun crisis. After accidentally going to the wrong house in an attempt to pick up his younger twin brothers, an 84-year-old white man named Andrew Lester shot at and hit Yarl.

Both Yarl and Lester have released their version of the events. Lester says that he got up out of bed and grabbed his gun after he heard his doorbell ring. He then says that he saw Yarl pulling on his glass storm door, which he shot twice through as he believed that it was an attempted robbery. One essential factor is that Lester said that they had no verbal interaction. Yarl states that after he pressed the doorbell, he waited outside for a sustained period of time, and Lester emerged with a firearm. He said he was shot in the head, and then shot a second time in the arm. He said he got up and ran, and the man said, “Don’t come around here.”

The epidemic of mass shootings, gang violence, and perpetual fear can all be attributed to one cause, the accessibility of guns. It is not normal for an 84-year-old to be able to permanently alter the life of a young kid with the simple pull of a trigger. This is not a global problem, this is an American problem. Ralph Yarl, and other shooting incidents, including the shooting of a 6 year old girl, the Kaylin Gillis shooting, the Texas cheerleader shooting, and the Dadeville Sweet 16 shooting are all examples in the past two weeks that show the consequences of widely accessible gun ownership. Many of these shootings are being coined as “impulse shootings,” a new focus of American news emphasizing the eagerness at which people leap to gun usage. Anti-gun yearning from the much of the American public is not a new concept, but nothing ever changes. However, with Washington becoming the 10th state to ban assault weapons, and other democratic states passing new gun restrictions, the progression of the anti-gun movement is the steadiest it’s been in decades.

By Elijah Roth