Year: 1873

Will Itg

 The entire handiness of having load ed pistol in your pocket, says the New York Tribune, was illustrated again il Brooklyn, by young gentleman o twenty, who shot and instantly killed his mother. The young man intended to kill some one else, to wit, person o1 about the same age, who was intoxicated and also armed with the always handy revolver. Two of them intoxicated and quarrelsome, both armed with revolvers which they had drawn upon each other with murderous intentions, the mother of one of them while attempting to sep arate the combatants shot dead by the pistol of her own son-picture at once graphic and ghastly of 8 condition ot society in which youthful precocity if so rapidly developed in the direction ot brutality and sensual indulgence, that the beardless boy lays aside his top for revolver and is graduated from the playground to the groggery and broth. el. It's such a manly thing to carry a revolver; it adds so much to ones in. tellectual stature, to ones personal dig nity, reputation for courage, and to one's pride of behavior and sense of self-respect. Doubtless this young man Roderick, twenty years old, thought when he dressed himself on Sunday morning and completed his personal adornments with the loaded revolver that he was much more a man with that than if he went unarmed that that in- tangible and incomprehensible thing he called his personal honor was safer from the possible disgrace of an insult that he was better entitled to be looked up to and respected by his fellow-men while he had in his reast-pocket so sure means of averaging discourtesy or slight. And the other budding mur- derer no doubt plumed himself on his manliness as he armed himself for his Sundays recreation, rum and riot. Not to have pistol was, in the considera- tion of both these young men, evidence of the callowness and inexperienced of youth. By this token they were men.

 So when they met the days dissipa- tion had prepared young Corcoran for had fixed themselves deliberately for the altercation, an assault by the drunken their pistols, and Roderick's mother,

  By accident, of course; that is, it was not as to the killing. If these two boys with loaded revolvers, as they did de- iberately on Sunday morning, it was to take ife-somebody's life. Possibly it would be in self-defense but the in- tent was to kill somebody under some circumstances is plain enough. h. deed, it may be we'll taken for granted that when any man or boys arms him. self with loaded pistol to go out into crowded streets, where the only game is human, he means murder. This boy meant to kill somebody, and he killed his mother. Of course he feels badly about it. He would have felt badly, though not perhaps as badly, if he had shot and killed some one else. It was the logic of events that he should feeI badly. It follows the killing just as naturally as the killing followed the loading of the pistol. There's no need of saying, and there's no sense in whin. ming, that this young man bears good reputation, and that he is overwhelmed with grief because he killed his mother. Let us stop all this business of personal and private sympathy and see whether upon the whole society has not some right in the matter. Here is a staring fact, not of accidental killing, but of deliberate preparation to do murder. It is not isolated or sporadic it illus trates fashion-the fashion of carrying deadly weapons, and of using them up on whatever occasion offers. We hold human life pretty cheap at the best in that beardless boys "of good reputa- tion" travel our streets habitually arm ed and waiting only provocation to take life, it is quite time that we do some thing besides waste sympathy on them when they happen to kill the wrong person.