Angry men used to just complain. Now they shoot people.

Back in the ancient times, meaning when I was young, there was a comic strip called Dennis the Menace. Dennis, not surprisingly, caused problems for a neighbor, George Wilson.

A cranky, cantankerous, elderly next-door neighbor; a retired postal carrier and (at least, as far as Dennis is concerned) his best adult friend. Dennis likes Mr. Wilson but unintentionally annoys him, as he regularly disrupts Mr. Wilson's attempts at a serene, quiet life. Dennis often interrupts Mr. Wilson's hobbies such as gardening, as well as coin and stamp collecting, at times accidentally damaging his property. As a result, the gruff old retiree displays a less than cordial attitude towards the young boy, though Dennis continues his well-meaning intrusions unabated.

Ah, those were the good old days. A youth irritates a cranky elderly neighbor and the response is “a less than cordial attitude.” It’s good that Dennis the Menace didn’t live in our times, or his comic strip life could have been cut short by a gunshot.

I got to thinking about this sorry state of our national affairs after learning about three shooting incidents recently that all involved angry men pulling a gun out and blasting away at people whose only crime was making an innocent mistake.

Ralph Yarl, a sixteen year old Black boy, was shot in the head and arm after ringing the doorbell at the wrong address when his mother sent him to pick up his younger siblings. The 84 year old man who fired through a screen while Yarl was standing on his porch has been charged with assault in the first degree and armed criminal action.

That address is going to get a special note in the computer system of Amazon, UPS, and FedEx delivery vehicles: “No dog. Just a trigger-happy geezer.”

At least Yarl is still alive. Kaylin Gillis, a 20 year old woman who was in a car that drove up a wrong driveway, is dead.

The man who lived on the ridge above this little upstate town had long had a reputation among some residents as a sour character who barked at neighbors’ dogs, scolded a local church and was so averse to unannounced visitors that he had at one time used a chain to cordon off his quarter-mile-long drive.

On Saturday night, just before 10 p.m., Kaylin Gillis and a group of her friends were traveling in a caravan of two cars and a motorcycle that mistakenly drove up that same driveway. They were looking for a friend’s house — and were met with deadly gunfire, killing Ms. Gillis, 20.

Then there’s Payton Washington, a cheerleader and high school senior who is in critical condition after being shot by another angry man who could have simply uttered some swear words, but chose to pull out a gun instead.

At a Tuesday night vigil shared to Instagram Live, Roth said she and three other cheerleaders with Woodlands Elite Cheer Co. had just completed their Monday night practice when they arrived at the H-E-B parking lot, which their carpool used. When Roth got into a car she thought was a friend’s, she realized that a man was in the passenger seat and quickly got out, she said. After Roth got into her friend’s car, she said, she saw Rodriguez approach and rolled down her window to apologize.

But what unfolded would echo what happened last week to Ralph Yarl in Kansas City, Mo., and Kaylin Gillis in Upstate New York.

“He pulled out a gun, and then he just started shooting at all of us,” Roth said, according to KHOU, an CBS affiliate in Houston. She added, “Payton opens the door, and she starts throwing up blood.”

The NRA and other gun zealots like to say that the reason so many people are killed by firearms in the United States is that the shooters have a mental problem, so we need better mental health services.

That’s true, but not for this reason. Other countries have just as many disturbed people as we do, yet they have vastly fewer gun deaths per capita. We stand alone among industrialized nations because we have by far the most guns per capita.

If guns made us safer, the United States would have a very low death rate from firearms. Actually, the problem is guns, not mental health.

Another lie the NRA and their enablers like to spread is that if a criminal shooter didn’t have a gun, they’d find another way to kill or harm their victim. That’s wrong. Malcom Gladwell explains why in his book, Talking To Strangers.

Gladwell devotes a chapter to Sylvia Plath, the poet who killed herself by turning on the gas in the oven in her England home and sticking her head inside. This was back when British homes used “town gas,” which contained the odorless and deadly carbon monoxide.

There’s a chart in Gladwell’s book that shows the dramatic drop in suicides among British women aged 24-44 after Britain switched to natural gas. The vast majority didn’t find another way to kill themselves after the easy way of town gas was taken away.

They decided to keep living. So it’s simplistic to call suicide a mental health problem, says Gladwell. Suicide happens when despair is coupled with an easy way of killing yourself. Like by sticking your head in an oven. Or using a gun.

(British women were much more likely than men to take their life by the oven approach, while men favored other means, such as shooting themselves. Even in suicide, women are tidier than men.)

Thus guns are the difference between our Dennis the Menace era and today’s massive deaths by firearms. Angry people used to just blow off steam in a harmless manner. Now, all too often they pull out a gun and shoot someone who makes them mad.