Samuel Moreno-Carranza, age seven, was injured after his mother fired a rifle inside church and police responded, killing her
A boy who was shot in the head at celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s Houston megachurch on 11 February has lost “a portion of his frontal lobe” while recovering at the hospital, according to his grandmother.
In a Facebook post three days after the shooting, Walli Carranza said her seven-year-old grandson, Samuel Moreno-Carranza, “has lost a major part of what makes us who we are” after “half of his right skull [had] to be surgically removed during two surgeries done in less than 24 hours”. Samuel had endured “cardiac arrest multiple times, and no one can determine whether he has significant brain activity because his scalp tissue is too friable” to let doctors attach electroencephalogram wires to him, Carranza added in a post that doubled as a criticism of the US’s lack of meaningful gun control.
I think there is the gun owners who absolutely fantasize they can hold off a trained army with their guns with Rambo. But thats a minority.
The real gun mindset is, “If you’re going to do it, I’ll make it difficult for you”. This is a key shift here. It’s the mindset that “there is going to always be thieves, crazies, rapists, house burglars… I’d rather own a gun and protect myself rather than wait for help.”
Most of the world doesn’t think like that. They laugh at Americans. But this is our American gun culture.
We don’t trust cops (Uvalde school shooting just being the recent example). And I’m not saying any of this is right. But when one side believes they can use guns to threaten the opposition (BLM protests, abortion clinics), suddenly when both sides are armed, it’s suddenly a “peaceful event”. During those proud boy protests and Nazi protests, when armed liberals told them to fuck off… They did. But if it was unarmed townsfolk, they laughed. And worse, the cops either ignored them or put up a barrier to protect them.
Again, not saying this is the world I prefer - not by a long shot. But I want to break that whole opinion that gun owners only want to defend against “da gubberment”.
There’s also just a general lack of trust in other people in the US. Not just the government. People always have to walk around looking over their shoulders. It’s not like that in other developed countries. The guns play into that. In the US, you just never know if someone’s going to be armed. In most other countries, it’s pretty safe to assume that people are unarmed.