The past few weeks have provided another dose of senseless American gun violence, with a mass shooting in Alabama and a trio of random yet thematically similar shootings elsewhere in the country gaining some measure of national attention. Missouri, New York, and Texas were the sites of egregious gun violence where innocent acts were met with urban warfare: in St. Louis, where a Black youth accidentally rang the wrong doorbell; in Hebron, NY, where a young woman drove into the wrong driveway; and in Elgin, TX, where a high school cheerleader mistakenly tried to open the door of a car that wasn’t hers. But rather than simply decrying these as random acts of violence, the similarities in these shooting open a door to lines of attack against the gun rights extremists that hold sway over the Republican Party, and as a prod to a Democratic Party that treats gun violence as calling for only the most incremental reforms.
Alongside the obvious point that the nation is awash with weaponry, the trio of shootings noted above point to a culture of paranoia, vengeance, and racism that ready weaponry turns deadly at the least provocation. We all need to be talking about these aspects of the shooters’ motivations — the way that all three appear to have been primed to shoot to kill at the least provocation, projecting dark fantasies of home and auto invasion onto innocent citizens going about their daily lives.
This perspective also highlights a fundamental lie propagated by gun rights extremists — that we are all somehow safer if everyone is armed. The truth is more sinister — that the arming of America goes hand in hand with a paranoid notion that one needs to be armed, and is justified in shooting first and asking questions later. This places the unarmed population in the position of unwitting and unwilling targets for the hair-trigger brigades peering through their screen doors and windshields at imagined terrors outside. The truth is the opposite — the more armed Americans there are, the less safe we all are.
But what of the idea that if only everyone were armed, then we would all exercise restraint in our interactions, leading to a more peaceable country? The circumstances of the three shootings give the lie to this canard as well. In all cases, if the victims had been armed, it would have made no difference to whether they suffered unprovoked, sudden attacks. Was it young Ralph Yarls’ god-given responsibility to be armed that day, and to have struggled for his sidearm to shoot back as he lay bleeding on the ground? Were the cheerleaders remiss at not having AR-15’s close at hand, so they could have laid down suppressive fire against their attacker as they lay bleeding in their vehicle? Did Kaylin Gillis deserve what she got because she didn’t have a Glock in her glove compartment?
This is the GOP’s recipe for American peace, which is actually a recipe for American mayhem.
In fact, I think we can reasonably speculate, given the paranoid nature of the attacks, that the shooters may well have acted as they did in part because they assumed their targets were themselves armed, and so felt it was better to get the drop on their perceived enemies.
In Missouri, the authorities’ need to consider whether the alleged shooter was protected by the state’s Stand Your Ground law highlights how pernicious and inciting such laws really are. As Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas put it, “If Stand Your Ground really lets somebody just shoot somebody that rings a doorbell [. . .] that puts the life of every postal worker, every campaigner, every Amazon delivery person at risk in this country.” But we could safely amend this list of potential victims to any American who ever has a reason to go up to a stranger’s — or a neighbor’s — door.
Our collective ability to identify with the situations in which the victims of these three shootings found themselves — going about their daily business, making innocent errors — is a powerful weapon for challenging and changing the culture of gun violence in America. We can’t let the paranoid, the racist, the trigger-happy define the nature of society as a war of all against all, in which no action is innocent and the penalty for making a paranoid person feel threatened is death or serious injury. There is no reasonable definition of a healthy society that fits this scenario.
These are the stories that the gun control movement must tell — of innocent Americans targeted not only by guns but by the paranoia and hatred amplified and incited by the gun rights movement, the way guns inevitably fetishize the violence they’re built for, and the way they empower extremists and racists to interfere with our fundamental right to go about our daily business. Though they may only be a small percentage of shootings in the country, they are happening on a regular and not widely reported basis. Encapsulating all the sickness and derangement of the armed and ready mentality, these shootings may be wielded as a hammer with which to wake Americans up to the lies, fantasies, and paranoia of gun rights absolutists.