Friday, July 04, 2008

Bang Bang Bang


Hand Guns in the Hood


Last night a woman in my neighborhood
shot an intruder in the face. The story on
the evening news headlines:

Woman credits hand gun with saving
her life.

Here’s what happened.
She arrived home sometime after 3 AM
and saw a man jump over the fence
and into her yard.
She ran indoors, got her hand gun
and ran back out to “see if he was still
there.”

He jumped her.
She fired the gun three times —
“I didn’t know what I was shooting at!”

He managed to run away but
turned up at a local hospital with
a gun wound in the face.

A better headline for the story might have been:

Hand gun propels incredibly stupid
person to shoot intruder by accident

and it should have concluded:
through no fault of her own, no one
was killed.

The woman later said
“It was a hard thing for me to do.”

Which may be true.
The simple thing would have
been to lock the door, remain inside,
and call 911, probably what she would
have done if she’d not had a
hand gun “for protection.”

© Susan Bright, 2008

Here's the local news story.

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

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posted by SB @ 4:23 PM

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hear Hear!

RP

3:17 PM  

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