Some things should hardly need saying. It’s not ethical or legal to shoot someone for ringing your doorbell. Or leaving your driveway. Or rolling a basketball into your yard. Or accidentally getting into your car before quickly leaving it.
More than half a dozen Americans have been shot for precisely those reasons in recent weeks. The alleged perpetrators were Black, Latino and white, and the victims came from a variety of backgrounds, too. The shootings happened in blue states and red, in urban areas and rural. But they shared a common denominator: the dangerously wrong idea that people can fire their guns whenever they feel frightened, or even just annoyed.
In the nearly 30 states that have adopted so-called stand-your-ground laws, which give people the right to use deadly force if they fear for their lives, shooters must be able to establish that their fear was reasonable. Paranoia is not a defense. It’s a delusion.
That delusion is fostered by a gun lobby that wants Americans to think they’re constantly under siege, which is turning what should be harmless everyday misunderstandings — “Hey, sorry about that” moments — into terrible tragedies. When some people hear “Knock, knock,” they’re no longer asking, “Who’s there?” Instead they’re grabbing their guns, and sometimes blasting away.
The lobby’s promotion of paranoia appears to be especially effective with men, who commit the majority of gun slayings. It’s no surprise that all four shooters were men, two of them in their mid-20s. Insecure young men have long sought to establish their virility with violence, and in particular with guns. (As an advertisement from Remington Arms Co., touting a semiautomatic rifle, once put it: “Consider your man card reissued.”) The cost of this misconception can be staggering; surviving victims of the young shooters included two cheerleaders and a 6-year-old girl.