In suburban Detroit, it was a lost 14-year-old looking for directions. In Kansas City, it was a 16-year-old who went to the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers. There was the 12-year-old rummaging around in a yard in small-town Alabama, the 20-year-old woman who found herself in the wrong driveway in upstate New York and the cheerleader who got into the wrong car in Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of them, and dozens more across America, were met by gunfire. Some were injured, some killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a nation where strangers are all too often seen as threats and fear has been politicized, honest mistakes and simple acts like going to the wrong address or car in a parking lot, or even just ringing the wrong doorbell, can seem like a fateful question of trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a tension not lost on Jae Moyer, who was at a rally at the federal courthouse in Kansas City on Tuesday, demanding a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the shooting of Ralph Yarl, the Black teenager shot last week when he went to the door of an elderly white man while looking for his brothers. Yarl, who was shot in the head and arm, is recovering at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI want to be welcoming and inviting to anyone that comes to my home. Even if they are asking for help and I can\u2019t help them I\u2019m going to be kind to them. I think that\u2019s the way everyone should be,\u201d Moyer said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the culture we have right now,\u201d Moyer said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of fear in our country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is also plenty of mistrust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AMERICAN SUSPICION<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early 1970s, surveys showed that about half of America believed most people were trustworthy. By 2020, that number had fallen to less than one-third. Meanwhile, Americans have believed for decades that crime is going up \u2014 even in years when it is going down \u2014 and also wildly overestimate their chances of being a crime victim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPart of that is you guys,\u201d said Warren Eller, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, referring to the media\u2019s relentless focus on crime. \u201cWe get 24 hours a day of all the dangers out there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s hardly surprising. Politicians have long used crime as a wedge issue to gain footholds. Neighborhood message boards foment paranoia about suspicious outsiders. And local and national newscasts bombard TV viewers daily with images of grainy surveillance videos showing a variety of crimes and provocative headlines about cities in decay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That includes shootings where innocent victims are shot by people who wrongly believe that they are under threat. While there are few statistics on these shootings, they appear to make up a very small percentage of the more than 15,000 people killed every year in the U.S. in firearm homicides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet in just six days in April, four young people across the U.S. were shot \u2014 and the woman in New York killed \u2014 for being at what someone decided was the wrong place. Just Tuesday, a man shot and wounded two cheerleaders in a Texas supermarket parking lot after one said she mistakenly got into his car thinking it was her own. One cheerleader was grazed by a bullet and treated at the scene. Her teammate was shot in the leg and back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This American mistrust has settled in as something that, while not normal, is less surprising than ever. And when mixed with legal confusion, easy access to weapons, poor firearms training and sometimes outright racism, it has produced a string of shootings like these that never seems to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take the legal issues. Shooters in incidents like these often use defenses based on \u201cstand-your-ground\u201d laws, which have broadened people\u2019s rights to defend themselves if they are threatened. But those laws, which have spread across America in the last 25 years, may have actually driven up violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A study published in 2022 by the JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found that monthly homicide rates increased between 8% and 11% in states with stand-your-ground laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think it has commonly become known of as a license to use deadly force whenever someone feels threatened,\u201d said Geoffrey Corn, the chair of criminal law at the Texas Tech University School of Law. He has extensively studied such laws, which he believes are deeply misunderstood by the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe fear has to be justified by the circumstances,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t get to kill somebody just because you fear them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AGGRAVATING FACTORS<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Legal experts expect Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old man who shot Yarl, to claim self-defense and cite Missouri\u2019s stand-your-ground law. On Wednesday, he pleaded not guilty in Yarl\u2019s shooting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Corn, a 22-year-military veteran, also wonders about America\u2019s recent boom in firearm sales and whether it has combined with insufficient training to compound the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat troubles me isn\u2019t that there are a lot of firearms, it\u2019s that nothing is required of someone who takes on the awesome responsibility\u201d of wielding them, Corn said. Even in states that require firearms training, he says training is often insufficient, with poor explanations of self-defense laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he was in the military, he had weeks of training before he was even allowed to touch a bullet. \u201cI was always conscious of the awesome killing power of a firearm,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then there is the unavoidable question of race, a central pillar of American distrust across the centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
False notions about threats posed by nonwhite people have played out repeatedly in modern American history, including in a number of high-profile cases when assailants attacked Black or Hispanic people who they believed meant them harm, even when no threat was apparent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yarl\u2019s shooting has drawn comparisons to the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, 17, a Black teenager visiting his father\u2019s home in a gated Florida community when George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, decided he looked suspicious and shot him to death. Zimmerman was acquitted after a trial in which his attorneys essentially used the state\u2019s stand-your-ground law as a defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It also echoes the case of Renisha McBride, a Black woman who knocked on doors in a Detroit-area community in 2013, seeking help after a car accident. She was fatally shot by a white resident who fired through his screen door, saying he feared she meant him harm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These cases, said Ibram X. Kendi, the bestselling author of books on racism and founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, occurred because people of all races and backgrounds are groomed to fear Black people as more prone to criminality and violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo one is born fearing another person because of their skin color,\u201d Kendi said. \u201cThere\u2019s so many different ways in which people are taught that Black people are dangerous, and those ideas actually create all sorts of dangers for Black people, including Black teenagers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe more we unlearn that idea and realize that we can\u2019t attach danger to skin color in any way,\u201d he said, \u201cthe less likely people are going to be to use lethal force against a 16-year-old child who is ringing their doorbell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This story has been corrected to show the Kansas City rally was held at the federal courthouse, not police headquarters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n