When a population is armed to the teeth and deemed immaterial, an itchy trigger finger is all it takes to assert one?s relevance?
?We don?t let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns???Joseph Stalin
The world has gone mad.
Life is cheap. In certain cities, towns, jurisdictions, and precincts, but in every era, the strong prey on the weak and force majeure is the price we pay for being sentient beings.
Murder presumably has consequences. But when a population is armed to the teeth and deemed immaterial, an itchy trigger finger is all it takes to assert one?s relevance, however fleeting that relevance may be.
We take killing for granted. We?ve grown numb to the rivers of blood, just as we?ve grown numb to so much else.
Early Wednesday morning, former WBC/WBA/IBF cruiserweight champion O?Neil Bell was gunned down during a robbery in Atlanta, Georgia.
He was pronounced dead on the scene.
Born in Jamaica on December 29, 1974, O?Neil?s family moved to the U.S., settling in Atlanta, where it was hoped he would have a better life.
A better life it might have been. A better death it was not.
These are terrible times, not the best and worst of times, and those at the bottom are always the first to pay the price.
A spokesman for the Atlanta Police Department said that about 30 minutes after midnight, 40-year-old Bell exited a MARTA bus with a 28-year-old man he did not know.
Details are sketchy, but according to Lt. Charles Hampton four thieves in a stolen 2006 PT Cruiser swerved in front of the two men. The gunmen exited the vehicle. An argument may or may not have ensued. The young man was shot in the hip and survived. Bell was shot once in the chest and did not.
Bell?s mother, Norma Bell, said O?Neil was a good and loving son. ?I just hope they catch the people who did this to him. He didn?t deserve to die like that.?
No one does. Life is precious, or at least it ought to be.
Too bad it is not.
The murder of O?Neil Bell has been called a ?senseless killing.? However clich?d, it is certainly that. The list of senseless killings is long and growing longer by the day, whereas the list of sensible killings is as short as it is oxymoronic.
