Gerald Stern Shooting Summary

Gerald Stern’s tone to shooting shifts by expressing the person who performs the action to be ignorant and then he hopes they improved their lives. In the beginning, Gerald states his testimony on the shooting incident and uses negative ways to convey the shooters: “Before we could reason with them, or submit, or try to escape, they began shooting through the open windows”(Stern 451). The fragment in the start of the sentence suggests the people shooting are impulsive because they hadn’t try to make a deal instead they were quick to attempt to kill Stern and Rosalind. This is a characteristic of ignorance because strategic thieves would’ve have tried to search for more of what they initially had planned to steal by approaching the victim in silence. With this approach the amount of witnesses would decrease dramatically since people might …show more content…
If they survived the life in Newark, if they aren’t dead yet, they would be in their thirties. They could be in prison, or they could have made a breakthrough. Maybe one of them went to college, is in computers, selling cars, studying law. I want to apologize for turning them into symbols, or vehicles. They weren’t pernicious, though what they did was unjust and stupid. And I want to remember how small was my brief “suffering” compared to thousands of others’ cruelty, absurdity, insanity, maliciousness they were forced to experience, how the lamb itself was twisted and pulled in a thousand ways, how it wept for itself at last, just as it wept for others- and continues to do so” (Stern 459).
Contrasting to the beginning, Gerald’s tone is now sorrow for the shooters by mentioning how others didn’t have such a good experience growing up compared to his short pain. He then hopes the shooters are alive and have improved from their previous mistakes. To conclude Gerald Stern’s attitude towards shooting shifted through communicating what type of person the shooters were and what he hoped they