Another brave American, who is totally brave because guns make you big and brave and manly through osmosis, has taken another life:

Greer said that he was tackled and thrown to the ground but managed to get his .22-caliber revolver and confronted them as they ransacked a safe containing cash. Seeing the gun, the couple ran out of the house and started down an alley. “The lady, she couldn’t run as fast as the man, so I shot her in the back twice,” Greer explained. “She’s dead, but he got away.” “She says, ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m pregnant! I’m going to have a baby!’ And I shot her anyway,” Greer said.

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She died.

Look, as with the guy who stood over a suffering teenage girl and killed her execution-style, I’m not condoning house break-ins. But they aren’t capital offenses. And even if they were, which is ludicrous, people deserve a trial by jury first.

If your explanation is that you selected your target because she was slower than her partner, you are not engaging in self-defense. You are engaging in human-hunting and you quite literally did what predators do, which is to attack the weakest member of the herd. Shooting unarmed people in the back is basically the definition of cowardly behavior. Shooting an unarmed pregnant woman in the back as she’s running from you may be the single most cowardly thing I’ve ever heard of. But this asshole is just so proud of himself. For some reason the video won’t embed, but you can watch it here. “I shot her so that’s going to leave a message on his mind for the rest of his life,” the killer, Tom Greer said. Because that’s how right wing propaganda destroys your moral compass, so that “teaching a lesson” or “sending a message” is so all-important that you should feel free to murder in order to do so.

That’s what the gun industry’s relentless propaganda equating being trigger-happy with being “manly” or “brave” has done: Encouraged sniveling cowards to think their cowardice is somehow “bravery”. There is nothing dignified or brave about shooting a pregnant woman in the back. It’s scummy and cowardly and pathetic.