Thursday, May 24, 2007

Duh!

On some bizarro news item, I see that a man has been sentenced to a life sentence in prison for killing a teen aged neighbor for walking on the one thing the man cared about on the planet - his lawn.

The man says that the teen provoked him by cutting through the yard earlier in the day on his way to a friend's house. The man, enraged, loaded his shotgun and waited three hours for the teen to return, and when the teen stepped on the grass, the man fired two shots, killing him. The man then called 911 and said "I just killed a kid."

Now, I've had my car egged more times than I can count. Some brats put a roadkill squirrel in our mail box the other day as a prank. My neighbors had their mail box destroyed by kids recently and a couple of years ago, a carload of kids pulled into the driveway across from ours and unloaded a car-full of empties. But, no matter how frustrating these acts of petty crime and mischief - no one got shot.

I don't think I'll ever understand the human values on life. On one hand, you have some guy who will KILL because someone stepped on his beloved yard -- but on the other hand, thousands of soldiers have been killed or wounded in the middle east, and there isn't the same human outcry. Very weird.

In related but not news -- I also read that some small town police force was raising money to help a fellow officer who was hit by a car while he was responding to a motorcycle accident. I was touched by the story and actually considered contributing -- until I read on and found that the police force was raffling off a shotgun. Yes, you read that right. Raffling. Off. A. Shotgun.

The mind reels.

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