Fear, mistrust, guns and their deadly consequences in America

In the suburbs of Detroit, it is lost 14-year-old looking for directions.

In Kansas City, a 16-year-old boy accidentally broke into a house to pick up his sister.

There’s also a 12-year-old rummaging around in a yard in a small Alabama town, a 20-year-old woman who found herself in the wrong driveway in upstate New York and a cheerleader who got into the wrong car in Texas.

All of them, and dozens of others across America, were met by gunfire. Some were injured, some were killed.

In a country where strangers are often seen as a threat and fear has politicians, honest mistakes and simple actions like ringing the wrong doorbell can seem like a fateful question of trust.

It’s a tension not lost in Jae Moyer, who attended a recent public meeting demanding a federal investigation into the shooting of Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager taken last week when he went to the door of an elderly white man while looking for his brothers.

“I want to welcome and invite anyone who comes to my house, even if they ask for help and I can’t help them, I will be kind to them,” said Moyer.

“But I don’t think that’s the culture we have today,” Moyer said. “There is a lot of fear in our country.”

There is also a lot of mistrust.

Decreased trust in others

In the early 1970s, surveys showed that about half of Americans believed most people could be trusted. By 2020, that number will drop to less than one-third.

Meanwhile, Americans have believed for decades that crime is on the rise — despite years of decline — and have also overestimated the likelihood of becoming a crime victim.

“Part of it is you,” said Warren Eller, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, referring to the media’s continued focus on crime.

“We get 24 hours a day from all the dangers out there.”

That’s not surprising. Politicians have long used crime as a wedge issue. Neighborhood message boards fuel paranoia about suspicious outsiders. And news broadcasts bombarded TV viewers with images of brutal surveillance videos showing various crimes and provocative headlines about the ruined city.

Innocent people get hurt and killed

This includes shootings where innocent victims are shot by people who mistakenly believe they are under threat.

While there are some statistics on this shooting, they appear to make up a small percentage of the more than 15,000 people killed each year in the US in firearm homicides.

But in just six days in April, four young men in the US were shot – and a woman in New York killed – because someone decided it was the wrong place.

This distrust of America has become something that, while not normal, is not surprising.

And when mixed with legal confusion, easy access to weapons, poor firearms training and sometimes outright racism, it has produced many shootings like this one that will never end.

Take the legal issue: Shooters in incidents like this often use a defense based on the “stand-your-ground” law, which has expanded people’s right to defend themselves if they are threatened.

But the law may have fueled violence: A study published in 2022 by JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found that the monthly homicide rate rose between 8 percent and 11 percent in states with the stance. the law.

“I think it’s widely recognized as a license to use deadly force if someone is threatened,” said Geoffrey Corn, chair of criminal law at Texas Tech University School of Law.

He has studied the law, which he believes is widely misunderstood by the public.

“Fear must be justified by circumstances,” he said. “You can’t kill people just because you’re scared.”

False understanding and race

Then there is the inescapable question of race, a main pillar of American mistrust for centuries.

The false understanding of the threat posed by non-whites has played out repeatedly in modern American history, including in some high-profile cases when attackers attacked Black or Hispanic people who they believed meant to harm them, even if there was no apparent threat.

Yarl’s shooting has drawn comparisons to the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, a Black teenager visiting his father’s home in a gated Florida community when George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, decided he looked suspicious and shot him dead.

It also touched on the case of Renisha McBride, a black woman who knocked on doors in a Detroit-area community in 2013, asking for help after a car accident. He was shot dead by a white resident who fired through a screen door, saying he was afraid he would be hurt.

Such cases, said Ibrahim X. Kendi, founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, occur because people of all races and backgrounds are conditioned to fear blacks because they are more prone to criminality and violence.

“There are different ways that we are taught that black people are dangerous, and that idea creates different kinds of danger for black people, including black teenagers,” Kendi said.

“As long as we don’t understand the idea and know that we can’t put our skin color in danger in any way,” he said, “there’s no way that someone would use force that could cause a 16-year-old to ring their doorbell.”