Since I watched a lot of the trial and I’ve thought a lot about it the last few days, I want to discuss the Amber Guyger case. The hard to swallow pill is that opinions on anything with which you weren’t directly involved are likely to be highly ill-informed. Before you make a large assumptive statement based on click bait titles from news stations that didn’t even get a seat in the courtroom, think about the validity and importance of your opinion. Guess what, you have none. I have none. The only two people that have the real understanding of what happened are Botham Jean and Amber Guyger. Unfortunately, only one of them is still alive and that leaves the rest of the ill-informed world to judge her based on ‘facts’ that can usually persuade you with ethos and pathos on your position.
But, judging her is required. It’s required so that she doesn’t do it again. It’s required so that we learn from both of their mistakes. It’s required so that apartment complexes fix locks quickly. And it’s required to send a message to everyone that no matter who you are, you will be held accountable for your mistakes and actions. And because of that, I’m not going to talk about my opinion of her trial and the case, instead, I’m going to talk about murder.
When we think about murder cases; we think of them as distant. Things that can never happen to us. And for the most part, you’re right. We individually have a 1 in 20,000 chance of being murdered. If you played women’s basketball in high school, you actually have a better chance of becoming a professional basketball player (1 in 13,000) than you do of being murdered. And you have a better chance of dying of leukemia than you do of being murdered (1 in 12,500). But being murdered yourself isn’t the only way that murder can affect you.
The odds get closer when you look at the chances of your immediate family getting taken from you. That being your Mom, your Dad, your brother or sister (assuming you only have two siblings) and one of your two children (if you have any) has a 1 in 3500 chance of having their life taken from them from another human being. To put that into perspective, average cruise ships hold about 6,000 people and Jesus was able to feed 4,000 people with a few loafs of bread and a couple small fish, granted it was a miracle. But anyone who watched the case for the trial this past week knows that it isn’t just immediate family that is affected by a murder. If we use Dunbar’s number of about 150 people, which includes immediate family, extended family, close friends and friends you see regularly, coworkers and a couple acquaintances, then the chance of you knowing someone in at least a familiar social way that will be murdered goes up to a 1 in 140 chance. That chance isn’t far away at all. We see all kinds of stories of murder on television but we push them far away so that we don’t have to deal with them. So that we don’t have to deal with as much fear as we should be feeling.
We don’t think about every day actions that we do that could increase our likelihood of being killed randomly or personally by another human being. Did you know that driving with your doors unlocked or going to the ATM at night can increase your chance? Did you know that you are most likely to be killed by someone in the same demographics as you? Even in a diverse nation, we are most likely to be killed by people in our own race and age group. Unless, of course, you’re a woman and then you’re most likely to be killed by your husband or your boyfriend. That means that the single most important decision a woman can make in preventing herself from being killed is the partner that she chooses.
What happened to Botham is so tragically seared into our minds because we realize that that could happen to anyone. Anyone could be sitting on their couch, watching television and then get shot dead by an intruder into their home. And there is no way that he could have prevented it. We dismiss most murders because we think, oh I’m not a prostitute or a druggie or a black man or a woman who chose the wrong husband. I would never make THAT mistake or that’s a problem for that demographic to deal with, not me. So why worry? What can we even do about it? I don’t have the answers and I don’t have any solutions. I think that it’s just something we should be conscious of and be educated on. Educate others. Protect yourself and the ones you love because losing each other before our time is way more prevalent than you might imagine.
And if you must state an opinion on the Amber Guyger Case, please at least watch the trial first.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~ears5/handouts/Prob_dying6_25_99.html
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