By admin 
After one man was killed and seven others injured in an early Sunday morning shooting, local resident Dorian Francis said he was concerned by people thinking problems can be solved with weapons.
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“It is too easy,” Francis said. “They might think ‘why not go ahead and do what I want, because I got the gun on me already.’”
The shooting, which killed 25-year-old Ty’shon Vogt, took place at The Jerk Hut, a Jamaican restaurant at 1004 Zimalcrest Drive off of Broad River Road.
The shooting remains under investigation by the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, with no arrests having been made or information about the shooter released to the public.
Sherry Harkless, who’s lived in Northwest Columbia for 11 years, said the main cause of Vogt’s death came down to one thing: easy access to guns.
“That’s somebody’s family, that’s somebody’s child, that’s somebody’s son,” Harkless said. “Now it’s legal for 18 to carry and a lot of these people don’t have the responsibility to carry the gun. And it’s causing a lot of problems, taking away people at an early age.”
In 2024, the South Carolina legislature passed a law allowing individuals 18 years or older to carry guns openly or concealed without training and without a concealed weapon permit.
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A 2019 study, “Right-to-Carry Laws and Violent Crime,” found that permit-less laws are associated with 13–15 percent higher aggregate violent crime rates 10 years after adoption. 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated South Carolina had the 12th highest firearm mortality rate in the nation, up from 13th in 2023.
The law also stipulated possession of a firearm alone does not give a law enforcement officer reasonable suspicion or probable cause to search, detain, or arrest the person. Harkless said she wants tighter restrictions on firearms.
Francis said the violence and its aftermath are painful for the community, especially following Rich Chow’s controversial acquittal in the shooting of Cyrus Carmack-Belton.
“Why go through all that?” Francis said. “If everybody keeps thinking on one level, we never gonna get nowhere, nobody coming to a real agreement. That’s the main issue.”
Francis said the key to moving forward after the shooting is a community-wide commitment to peaceful conflict resolution.
“It’s always this person, that person,” Francis said. “If you know something’s going bad for the neighborhood, why not make it better?”
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