He Was A Good Kid, My Ass

Paul Helmke writes an article about a teenaged kid who was trying to convince his friends to all sign some pledge to not use guns, blah blah blah, but then who was "senselessly slain" after a meth addict who he threw a golf-ball at from a moving vehicle chased him down and shot him in the head. To Helmke, it is a metaphor for everything the gun-grabbing lobby has been saying all along.

Helmke titles his article using the epitaph from the kid's principal, "He was a good kid."

Ummm, no. If you are throwing a small, hard object at a high rate of speed, from an even-faster moving car, in such a fashion that you could potentially kill someone ... (and that's important here)... and do that for fucking kicks as a prank, you are at least as much of an asshole, in my opinion, than the guy who hunted you down and shot you in the head. Maybe even a little worse.

At least he had a reason for his violence. You attacked him. The junkie, for all the ills he may have performed in his life, never did anything to you to deserve your violence against him. It may not have been a "proportional response", by any stretch, but at least he had a reason for what he did. It was a twisted, out of proportion, act of retaliation for things you did to him.

You, "the good kid", endangered his life for no reason. Other than to give you and your friends a cheap laugh.

I'm sorry for your parents' loss, make no mistake. They didn't do anything necessarily to deserve this tragedy. But make no mistake, this kid is not someone to put up on a pedestal as "a good kid." Good kids don't do that sort of thing.