I've spent the better part of the last month trying to explain "random" to my youngest son who's lost 7 close friends (all under the age of 30) since January. 1 to suicide, 1 to a car accident, 1 to a drug overdose, 1 to a motorcycle accident, 1 in Afganistan and 2 to murder.
It's impossible to explain "random" because when random happens to you, it's no longer random and the word loses all meaning.
All of the deaths were ugly. But the murders were particularily ugly. I've worked in EMS for a long time, I've seen lots of "ugly" - and because I was a medic in a small town most of the ugly was known to me before it became so. But this was especially hideous because it should have been preventable.
Two sisters, 26 and 28 years old - one newly married, one a first time home owner. Beautiful girls with everything going for them. Good jobs, great families, good health. Their father was my EMS supervisor and Batt. Chief - he's got pancreatic cancer, but that's another tragedy. Anyhow, newly married sister came back to her home town to spend the weekend with new home owner sister. They decided to throw a party - just a few friends she hadn't seen for awhile. One friend brought a casual acquaintance who'd just moved into the neighborhood. Casual acquaintance got drunk and sisters decided they'd let him sleep it off on the couch. After all, friends don't let friends drive drunk, right?
Only casual acquaintance got up in the middle of the night, raped one sister, cracked her over the head and slit her throat. Not content with that, he woke up the other sister and did the same to her.....dragged both of them into the bathroom and threw them in the tub. He then systematically robbed everything he could from the house and, several hours later, covered the sisters with bed sheets and blankets and set fire to them.
Their dad found them - the coroner's report said they both had smoke in their lungs. You all don't need to be medics or doctors to know what that means.
Turns out "casual acquaintance" had just gotten out of jail 6 weeks previously - for rape. Second rape. He's done two 5 year terms for rape, in fact and was arrested approx. 6 weeks after the first one for the second one. While in jail for Rape #2 he'd amassed over 75 violations for various infractions. He still got out of jail after serving half his sentence - and he waited 6 weeks and escalated his rape into rape, murder and arson.
There was nothing in any paper but the local ones. Channel 9 in Chicago gave it a few minutes, but no details - only that the bodies of two young women had been found murdered.
It scares me to think of what we don't read. We think we know it all because of the Internet but we don't. This double murder took place at the same time the co-ed went missing from Yale. One made national news, two didn't.
I'm glad for the parent's sake that this one didn't - they've got enough on their plate as it is without battling media coverage - but it seems unfair that two young girls with everything to live for were so brutally victimized without acknowledgement of some sort from the rest of the world.
Makes me wonder how much else we don't hear about even though we think we hear about all of it.
Would a gun in the house have helped the sisters? Maybe, who knows? Or maybe he would have wrestled it away from them and used it against them. Maybe that would have been better - they would have died sooner at least.
Being a single woman for a long time I have, at various times, had guns in the house and didn't have guns in the house. Honestly, I never felt much safer knowing I had one when I had one. A woman, especially a small one, is always aware that what looks to be her saviour could turn out to be her downfall. It doesn't take much to take a gun away from a woman half your size, especially if she's scared - and if she's in that situation, she's scared. She's either got to be prepared to use it or she shouldn't have it. But no one really knows if they're going to be prepared.....it's a lot different in reality than it is in your mind. Your hands shake, your arms shake, your whole body shakes - and no matter how good you shoot on the range, you've got to remember - you're probably not shaking when you're aiming at a paper target. Paper targets aren't screaming at you, they aren't lunging at you, your kids aren't whimpering in their bedrooms when you're aiming at a target at the range - the cat's not hissing, your heart's not pounding, the dog's not barking, there's not some stranger doing his level best to shut everyone the hell up since this is all way more than he expected and now he's as trapped as you are - and he's got nothing to lose if he decides that simply robbing you isn't going to work anymore.
Plus, if there are kids in the house, where do you keep the damn thing? You darn well better have it locked up - and it ought to be unloaded. So what do you do when you wake up to find a 6 foot tall stranger standing over you? Ask him to hold on a second?
If you're single and alone you COULD sleep with it under your pillow - I won't bore you with stories of how many times I've gotten called in the middle of the night because some poor fool mistook the trigger for his remote or some such nonsense - I'll just tell you it's really NOT a good idea to sleep with a loaded pistol.
It's a quandry, isn't it?
Take the guns away from everyone - leave them to the police and the military. Lock up the criminals - forget about "good behaviour," forget about reduced sentences, forget about leniency in all but the most obvious of cases, forget about plea barginning. Chemically castrate the raping bastads - hell, non-chemically castrate them for all I care. As for the murderers - if you're going to have the death penalty, use it - otherwise lock 'em up and throw away the key.....make sure everyone's aware that's what's going to happen.
Rant, I'm ranting.
MrPRnV is going to kill me.
Re: Is it gun time?
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