Why are young people being shot for ‘mistakes’?

What happened to the carefree days of childhood, when one could go into a neighbor’s yard and retrieve a ball if it went over the wall or rolled onto their property?

Maybe you’d get yelled at and told to “get off the lawn,” but that was probably the worst that would happen.

That is no longer the case in some places. Now, if a child’s ball or other toy goes into a neighboring yard, it’s best to leave it there.

But “what’s the harm in retrieving a ball?” one might ask. A North Carolina family could answer that question easily: It could result in being shot at.

A basketball rolled down a residential street in a Gastonia, NC, neighborhood and into a man’s yard, on Tuesday, enraging him, ac- cording to a news report.

Witnesses told the news station WSOC-TV that Robert Louis Singletary, 24, was armed and dangerous. Kinsley White, 6, was hospitalized after gunfire erupted and she was seriously wounded. She has stitches from bullet fragments in her cheek. Meanwhile, Singletary is on the run.

“He came out with a gun, he started shooting,” the little girl told the news station. “Hope my daddy is OK.”

Her father remains hospitalized. White’s mother was grazed by a bullet and treated at the scene. She told the news station that she heard Singletary make a threat to her husband and daughter saying, “I’m going to kill you.” He then chased them while firing his gun, the report said.

Singletary is no stranger to violence. He was arrested in December for assaulting his girlfriend with a “mini sledgehammer” and prevented her from leaving his apartment until she cleaned up the evidence of the assault, the news report said.

Neighbors told the news outlet that Singletary was new to the area and often got angry with children in the neighborhood.

This latest incident follows a spate of high-profile shootings involving young people. On Monday, a 25-year-old Texas man was arrested for shooting at a group of high school cheerleaders after one of them tried to get into his car, mistaking it for hers.

A 20-year-old woman was killed in upstate New York over the weekend after the car she was in pulled into the wrong driveway while they were looking for a friend’s house. And last Thursday, a teenage honors student was shot twice by an 84-year-old man after he accidentally rang the doorbell at the wrong house, while trying to pick up his brothers in a Missouri neighborhood.

Seems like more folks are engaging in the “shoot first, ask questions later,” train of thought. But why? Are they so threatened that they have to open fire on a vehicle pulling into their driveway, or a person ringing their doorbell? Or a child chasing a ball?

Meanwhile, Singletary is facing four counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflecting serious injury and one count of possession of a firearm by a felon, according to the Gastonia Police Department.

Some people are so quick to pull a gun out and begin firing, before they even realize the gravity of the situation. You know something is wrong with society when a person’s first reaction to a stranger on their property is to shoot them.