In contrast to the last post, here’s the story of a teenager sneaking into the neighbor’s house by accident instead of his own and getting shot as an intruder.

How this story gets interpreted is something, I’ll maintain, that’s likely to vary widely. I think any sober gun discussion ought to include this kind of outcome as well as the successful outcome of the last post. Both are important, and easy answers are not apparent beyond the very clear fact that a gun raises the stakes in any situation, for better or worse.

I’ll only say that last graf of the last post seems operative here. Here ’tis again, since our blog posts show up on separate pages:

How many situations like this happen every day, to all kinds of people? How many variations play out? Some perpetrators have guns; some interveners have them; some victims have them. The complexities and sudden turns of such situations mean, I contend, that sometimes a gun is an advantage, and sometimes it means innocent people get shot.