Kevin Monahan, 65, shot 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis after a car she was riding in with friends made a wrong turn on his property
A man was convicted of second-degree murder Tuesday for fatally shooting a young woman when the SUV she was riding in mistakenly drove up his rural driveway in upstate New York.
A jury found Kevin Monahan, 66, guilty of second-degree murder for shooting 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis on a Saturday night last April after she and her friends pulled into his long, curving driveway near the Vermont border while they were trying to find another house.
The group’s caravan of two cars and a motorcycle began leaving once they realized their mistake. Authorities said Monahan came out to his porch and fired twice from his shotgun, with the second shot hitting Gillis in the neck as she sat in the front passenger seat of an SUV driven by her boyfriend.
This is the nature of widespread gun ownership. Owning a gun turns every argument, every perceived wrong, every bruised ego into a potentially deadly situation. Buying a gun, “for protection,” is the dumbest fucking statement I’ve ever heard. Increasing the number of guns laying around ALWAYS creates a more dangerous environment.
How are you going to protect yourself from threats?
Can you fight?
I’m going to start by determining whether or not said “threats” are actually threats to begin with.
Because most of them aren’t. Most gun nuts (disclaimer: I could probably be defined by some standards as a gun nut myself) have this nutty pathological notion that every single person, shadow, and tiny thing that goes bump in the night is personally out to get them. Given the overwhelming majority of non-gun-nut people who do not, in fact, get got on a daily basis despite not even having a gun to defend themselves we can actually conclude that this is just unfounded paranoia.
Just saying.
Yikes, it’s crazy the mental gymnastics you’re willing to go through to avoid admitting you can’t defend yourself.