Just last week, two Texas cheerleaders, Heather Roth and Payton Washington, were shot when they mistakenly got into the wrong car. Leaving the supermarket, the two girls got into what they thought were their car, but a man was sitting in the passenger seat. The man was Pedro Tello Rodriguez, 25, who was arrested after the incident. After exiting the car, the girls tried to apologize to the man but he threw his hands up and started firing on the girls. Both Heather and Payton survived, but Payton is severely injured still in ICU. The two are very elite and accomplished cheerleaders, but this event may impact their careers, especially for Payton.
This marked the fourth incident of gun violence where someone made a mistake and was met with vicious gunfire. How is it possible that someones immediate reaction to a mistake is to start fire on harmless and innocent people? The two cheerleaders were even apologizing yet the man still felt the need to open fire. The young African American boy in Kansas City was harmlessly looking for his siblings and was shot in the head. It makes no sense. The ability to own a gun should come with loads and loads of not just physical training but mental training as well. Possessing a gun is a dangerous and our country has forgotten that in the midst of our gun culture. Look at police training. They are only trained for six months before they’re thrown on the job with a gun attached to their hip. The US requires far less hours of training for police than other countries. For example, US officers spend about 21 weeks training before they can go on patrol, which equates to a little over 500 hours. In Finland, police officers spend about 5,500 hours training before they are eligible to go on duty. If we can’t even have our police officers adequately trained with guns, having ordinary citizens trained seems unlikely. If this country wants guns, there needs to be major change in how we enforce gun safety.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/19/us/texas-cheerleaders-woodlands-elite-shooting/index.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733
I’ve heard some people claiming that he had a right to do this in self defense, as they were in his car. However, I really disagree with that claim, as two girls are often times not going to do much harm to a man. Also, since they were apologizing and exiting the car, the man really shouldn’t have been scared at all, it was an honest mistake. I would have more of an understanding of this claim if the gender roles were reversed, as I would be pretty freaked out to see a man coming out of my car. Obviously, as much as we fight for gender equality, men have historically been more violent towards women than vice versa. I still wouldn’t shoot the guy though, and I think the guy just wanted to shoot them out of hatred, not out of fear.