In the span of less than a week, the United States was rocked by several shootings throughout the country, motivated by simple misunderstandings and broadcasting an increasingly salient problem in this country.

On the night of Apr. 13, Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old boy from Kansas City, Missouri, was on his way to pick up his twin brother from a friend’s house. However, he ended up approaching the home of 84-year-old Andrew D. Lester. Yarl knocked on the door and Lester responded by shooting the boy twice in the head and arm. Yarl went to several surrounding homes before a neighbor stepped in to help. Lester would eventually turn himself in and was charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. Yarl was discharged from the hospital three days later and is expected to make a full recovery.

A couple of days later, in Upstate New York, a very similar event took place. Late in the evening on Apr. 15, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was riding in a car with her friends and boyfriend looking for another friend’s house. They turned into the wrong driveway and, after realizing, began to back out. It was then that the owner of the home they had pulled into, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan emerged outside with a shotgun and fired two shots into the vehicle, killing Gillis. Monahan was then arrested after a lengthy standoff with police and has been charged with second-degree murder.

A few days after Gillis’ death, yet another shooting incident occurred. On Apr. 18 in Elgin, Texas, two cheerleaders, Heather Roth and Payton Washington, were exiting an H-E-B supermarket after their practice. Searching for their vehicles, Roth mistakenly attempted to enter a car before realizing it wasn’t hers, seeing a man in the passenger seat. Initially frightened, Roth went into her friend’s vehicle. The vehicle would pull around back to the car and Roth rolled down the window to apologize to the individual. At that point, the man, later identified by a store manager as 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr, pulled out a gun and opened fire at the girls, wounding Roth and critically wounding Washington. Rodriguez was charged with deadly conduct and Washington is in stable condition.

Due to the sheer proximity of these events to each other, many have begun to make connections between a heavily armed America buoyed by Stand Your Ground-type laws and an increased sense of paranoia amongst the populace.

Mallory Dunlap ‘25, the chair of John Carroll’s Students Demand Action Branch, spoke to The Carroll News concerning this string of shootings. “I can say with certainty that gun violence will only continue to rise without reforms being put in place. Two heinous examples in the past few weeks are the shootings of Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis.”

“Both teens made innocent mistakes — ringing the wrong doorbell and pulling into a driveway to turn around. Think how many times we all have done something similar? And for those mistakes, they were shot with Yarl suffering life-changing, severe injuries and Gillis being killed. The emphasis on making guns more easy to obtain and own is simply compounding the problems and making routine, run-of-the-mill situations life-threatening.”