"Who Shot Johnny?": A Portrait of Youth Violence

Who Shot Johnny?

As humans we strive to live in a utopian environment, free of elements of aggression, greed, and violence. Most of us try to live a healthy and satisfying life, gaining from opportunities that we have sought and worked hard for. We take life as it comes, and we accept the challenges and difficulties that life puts out as we continue on no matter how hard it gets. However, there are a multitude of people who tend to think that life is just too hard and that they should be handed everything on a silver platter. Greed and violence begin to factor into their life as they continue in their set ways. They think that the world should revolve around their every need and that life is unbearably hard and unjustly unfair. These are the people who think that rules are meant to be broken and cannot grasp the genuine idea of equal opportunity. Some feel jipped and decide that they will steal other people's gains to get through their miserable lives. Others take a much more drastic approach by turning to violence. They think that violence is the answer so that they may distribute fear throughout their neighborhood in order to gain the respect that they very much deserve. They think that negotiating by means of a weapon is a much more effective way of getting what they want they think that a gun will make them that much tougher than the next guy. These people are the convicts who plague our societies and make life that much harder for the rest of us. The idea of peace has never come across their minds; the only peace that they want is a piece of our pie that is in fact our slice that we have labored for throughout the years. What I want to know is what has violence done to contribute to the good of mankind? If destruction and ...

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...against society. The type of person that Dickerson describes as Johnny's assailant is everything wrong with society. It just isn't one person committing all the wrong; rather it is all the negative ideals and rudiments of our society that curse us. The blame cannot be centered on one individual making it that much harder for criminals to be sentenced in the court of law.

This story was more of a lesson about maturing in my eyes. There are countless numbers of kids who grow up to be criminals because no one ever taught them. Those are the types of people that would symbolize the shooter; they are a bunch of low life morons with nothing better to do than to hurt everyone. They are the people who ruin neighborhoods, turning something nice into trash. Hopefully as time progresses this injustice will end, and no more innocent people will be getting shot for saying hi.