April 10th was the anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday agreement which put an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Throughout the thirty years of the Troubles, around 3,500 people, mostly civilians, were tragically killed. Worthy of an international effort to put an end to. Nobel Peace prizes were given to those involved in bringing the Troubles to a close.
According to Pew Research, 45,222 people died of gun related injuries in the United States of America in 2020. Those numbers have increased each year for the past two years. Oddly enough no foreign governments have offered to help arbitrate a ceasefire.
In the past month we’ve had more mass shootings than I can keep track of. Sometimes two in one day. These were random shootings. Or workplace issues. Or personal beefs. And of course there were the four incidents in this last week that weren’t mass shootings, simply cases of individual gun owners making split decisions based on, what. Racism? Fear? Isolation? An addiction to Fox News?
• An old White man in Kansas city shoots a Black youth who accidentally came to his door. No words were exchanged. Andrew Lester heard the knock, came to the door and started shooting through the glass door. Miraculously the victim Ralph Yarl survived despite being shot twice, once in the head.
• A White gun-owner in upstate New York, by all accounts an extremely angry man, shoots a shotgun at a car that accidentally turned up his driveway. Kaylin Gillis, 20 years old, is killed. The shooter, Kevin Monahan, says he “sincerely regrets this tragedy” and “feels terrible that there was a fatality.” (After all, he was just using his weapon as it was intended to be used, right?)
• Two teenagers accidentally went to the wrong car in a parking lot in Elgin, Texas. They thought it was their friend’s car. The man inside responded by shooting them. The shooter was a Latino man.
• A six year old child and her father were shot as they retrieved a basketball that had rolled into a neighbor’s yard. The shooter was a Black man.
The one thing that they all have in common is that the perpetrators were all male and all had at one point decided their lives would be better with guns in them. And part of the American dream is that we can make that happen. Need a gun? No problem. Need to exercise your right to live without fear of gun violence? You’re on your own.
I overheard a young man from Belgium talking to a woman from Florida on a plane coming back to the States a few months ago. He said he was excited but scared about his first visit to America. The woman seemed honestly surprised and asked why. He said he was worried about getting shot. She was confused. Why should this young White European be worried? Was he planning on knocking on someone’s door? Driving up the wrong driveway? Mistaking a stranger’s car for his own? Retrieving a basketball? Being a minority? Being a woman? Being a student in an elementary school?
We’ve become a nation where one should think twice about knocking on a stranger’s door, or really doing anything normal. This is because over the last 40 years the NRA, their political mouthpiece the Republican Party, and their media wing Fox News, has been hammering a false narrative that America is facing increasing dangers from multiple fronts: Black people, Immigrants, Muslims, Gays, and the Democratic party. To counter these threats we all must arm ourselves. But as gun sales proliferate, so does gun violence. And to counter gun violence, we must further arm ourselves. And so on. Until we are dead or have just accidentally shot a teenager.
Ironically, crime in America has gone way down since this narrative began, but after falling for years, guns deaths have climbed way up. Why crime has fallen is a complex and hotly debated issue with arguments ranging from less lead in the water, higher abortion rates, higher rates of imprisonment, better education, rising quality of life, the lowest unemployment rate in a century, etc. But why guns deaths have risen seems obvious; there are now more far more guns in America than Americans.
When you’re a hammer, suddenly everything starts looking very much like a nail. When scared, angry men* have been told time and time again that someone’s coming for them, and they’ve weaponized their homes to prevent that certainty, it’s not a huge mystery why they explode in violence when an innocent child who doesn’t look like them comes to their door. Drives up their driveway. Goes to the wrong car. Comes looking for a basketball.
Knock knock, America.
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*The fact that the vast majority of these shooter are men is something that we need to grapple with. Some wire has gotten crossed in American masculinity that I see no immediate solution for. In the richest country in the history of the world, in a time of historical peace and comfort, American men, for some reason, feel so threatened that they are open to messages warning them of imminent destruction and are reacting increasingly with violence.
In the first iteration of this post I misspelled Ralph Yarl's name as Yard. I also misspelled gun, as "fun." Both these errors were egregious given the serious nature of this post. I've updated both errors.