Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” [i]
I would say, “When I was young, I was an idiot.”
A friend recently asked, “If you pulled in just in time to see a man leaving your home with an armload of your guns, would it be legal to shoot him?”
When I was young, I might have said something like, “Yeah, then I’d pull his body back inside before police arrive.” I’ve said things even dumber. I’ve said I would kill someone if they killed my dog.
Someone should have sat me down back then and asked, “Really? You would take a man’s life for killing a dog? You would kill someone for stealing valuable items?”
Grown men thinking that way results in things like the KKK. No good can come from such a distorted value of human life. But there are some blurry lines.
I was visiting with my brother (a career law-enforcement officer) about the Amber Guyger case. Guyger is the former Dallas officer who shot a man in his own apartment thinking it was her apartment (she was off by one floor). When she went to unlock the door, thinking it was her door, she found it unlocked, entered with her weapon drawn, encountered, then killed the man.
My brother asked me, “Why did she go in?” I gave him the same answer others, including officers, had given him; “She thought it was her apartment.”
He said again, “But why did she go in?” Knowing my brother as I do, I caught his point.
Let’s say it was her apartment. She had no family living with her. Why would she go in?
Would you?
Think About it
Why would you enter a danger zone alone if there are no lives in danger? There are many times the right choice is to be an expert witness. Back off, call 911 and watch. She will wish for the rest of her life she had done that.
Life is a series of choices. The more correct decisions you make, the clearer your vision becomes. The more wrong choices made, the muddier the waters get. Amber Guyger made some poor choices that day.
Good decisions beat good aim.
[i] I Corinthians 13:11 (NIV)
Carl this was one of your best ones. I had been following the case and you gave it a new perspective.
Thank you James, but I can’t take credit for having seen it that way at first. It was my own brother who sees things like this so much clearer. He gained his sense of awareness, duty and appreciation for life in the same school you did. He came home from South Vietnam in 1970 and at 20 years old was already a man experienced in the most real lessons of life. You attended the same school. When he talks of life lessons I listen.