Ajury ruled Tahliek Taliaferro's slaying accidental. Protesters are calling it premeditated murder.
What's undeniable is that a night of bad blood and bad judgment would have resulted in little more than a fistfight without the weapons at Ethan Parrish's disposal.
A gun in the wrong hands at the wrong time has a way of turning a quarrel into a tragedy.
On the night of their fateful encounter with Taliaferro in Powhatan County, Ethan Parrish and his younger cousin, Joey Parrish, were rolling in an SUV with three weapons after a day spent drinking rum, smoking pot and taking LSD.
Ethan Parrish loaded an assault rifle with an 83-round drum clip and squeezed off six shots in the direction of the vehicle Taliaferro was riding in. Two bullets hit the ground, and four struck the car, killing Taliaferro and wounding another passenger.
And to think it all started with talk of a fistfight.
I thought of events in Powhatan while reading Sunday's article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the explosion of gun sales since Barack Obama was elected president. To hear gun dealers describe it, ammo is virtually flying off the shelves. A spokesman for a Missouri-based bullet manufacturer said demand was up more than 50 percent since late last year.
Said Lonnie Maurer, the owner of an Ohio-based ammunition dealership: "I've never seen this level of paranoia . . . out of what I would call normal people."
Paranoia and guns -- like alcohol, drugs and guns -- are a volatile and toxic cocktail.
Ethan Parrish testified that he was scared the night he killed Taliaferro, though other testimony suggests that Parrish and his cousin triggered the confrontation.
Gun enthusiasts say they're scared of their constitutional rights being eroded, or of civil unrest and increased crime because of the poor economy.
They're afraid that lawenforcement officers will try to take their guns. And they're afraid that the Democratic-controlled Congress will riddle the Second Amendment with bullet holes.
Me? I'm afraid of all these guns out here.
Perhaps I've read too few heartwarming tales in which the law-abiding citizen gets the drop on the bad guy. Too often, police seem overwhelmed by firepower -- see the recent slaying of four officers by a parolee in Oakland.
A man walks into a Carthage, N.C., nursing home and kills seven sick and elderly people and a nurse? An armed and mentally unhinged student massacres 32 people at Virginia Tech? For gun-rights advocates, these tragedies are merely proof that if more folks had guns, we'd all be better off.
In the Cold War, the idea that we'd be safer by matching the Soviet Union bomb for bomb was called mutually assured destruction.
The stockpiling of handguns and assault weapons will create no such standoff. There aren't enough guns to make us safer.
Contact Michael Paul Williams at (804) 649-6815 or mwilliams@timesdispatch.com.
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