Does any of this sound familiar?

Klint Ludwig, the grandson of Andrew Lester, the man who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in Kansas City last week, told CNN today that he wasn’t surprised that his grandfather had shot the teenager. “The warning signs were there. I wasn’t shocked when I heard the news.  I believe he held – holds – racist tendencies and beliefs. His actions are his responsibility, and falling into the fear and paranoia stoked by the 24-hour news cycle and wild conspiracies did not help his mental state,” Ludwig said.

Yarl is an honor student at his high school in Kansas City and had approached Lester’s home by mistake, seeking to pick up his brothers from a play date.

Yesterday, Robert Louis Singletary, 24, shot a 6-year-old girl and her parents when a basketball neighborhood children were playing with in the street rolled into his yard.  The father was shot in the back by Singletary and is in serious condition.  The child was hit in the cheek by bullet fragments.  The mother was grazed by a bullet.  The mother’s and daughter’s wounds have been stitched up and they have been released from the hospital.

"He looked at my husband and my daughter and told them, 'I'm going to kill you,'" the mother told CNN.  Singletary was out on bond for an assault on his girlfriend in December.  After the shooting, he fled to Florida.  He turned himself into a police department near Tampa, where he was arrested and is awaiting extradition back to North Carolina.

As ABC News reported this evening, “The North Carolina shooting follows a string of similar incidents where seemingly ordinary mistakes have led to serious consequences involving firearms.”

“Involving firearms?”  If no guns had been present at the time of the incidents, nobody would have been shot, no blood would have been shed, and most probably, nobody would have been arrested.