South Africans Seek Meaning To Shooting

South Africans are in dismay from the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp.

On February 14th, Steenkamp's life ended when her Paralympian boyfriend, Oscar Pistrious shot her three times. Steenkamp and Pistrious dated for four months and during this time Steenkamp gained some fame that she wanted to use to make a difference.

The day prior to her death, she was preparing for a speech against the violence towards women. Prior to her relationship with Pistrious, Steenkamp experienced first hand experience with an abusive relationship "...and wanted passionately speak out on it", said her best friend, Gina Myers. "She said that people chose to be ignorant because the subject made them uncomfortable."

Now, South Africans debate if Steenkamp is a victim of national addiction on self-defense and crime, or if she died from the same domestic violence she was trying to fight against.

South Africa's prosecutors sees Pistorius as a reckless, hothead young man with jealous behavior and decline his unrealistic version of the events that occurred on Feb. 14th:

Pistorious seemed to be consumed with personal safety. He slept with a gun by his bed and a cricket bat was kept in arms reach. On the tragic night, "...he [Pistorius] thought an intruder was in the house. Not wearing his prosthetic legs, feeling vulnerable in the pitch dark and too scared to turn on the lights, the track star pulled his 9mm pistol from beneath his bed, moved toward the bathroom and fired into the door. It was only after he called to girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp -- whom he thought had been in bed beside him after a quiet evening -- that he realized something horrible might have happened..."

South Africans are in a hysteria of self-examination because some view it as a reminder to the violence in South Africa. Many whites, like Pistorius, live in heavily protected, gated, blocked-off and surveillance communities. Yet with all of the protection, most still feel threatened by the black majority and fear attack, so they take matters into their own hands.

Ms. Steenkamp's death grabs the spotlight on violence against women in South Africa and across the world, as well as soul searching about the macho culture of South African men, “This is very much linked to a dominant South African masculinity in which guns are an archetypal symbol of masculine strength,” said Rachel Jewkes, director of the Gender and Health Research Unit of the South African Medical Research Council.

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