Someone knocks on the wrong door. An SUV pulls into the wrong driveway. A teen tries to get into the wrong car. A group of kids let a basketball roll into a neighbor’s yard. These are everyday slip-ups, innocuous, benign — and in another time, quickly forgotten.
Sadly, as a horrified nation has seen in recent days, these momentary lapses can become tragedies in an America where all-too-prevalent is a shoot first, ask questions later mindset.
In Kansas City, Missouri, a 16-year-old was shot twice April 13 by a homeowner after the boy rang the wrong doorbell while trying to pick up his younger siblings. Ralph Yarl survived, and 84-year-old Andrew Lester has been charged in connection with the shooting.
Two days later, a 20-year-old woman was in an SUV with a group of friends when the vehicle turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York. Police say a homeowner came out onto his porch wielding a shotgun and fired at the SUV as it was pulling away, killing Kaylin Gillis. Kevin Monahan, 65, has been charged with second-degree murder.
On April 18, a homeowner became enraged when children playing on a Gaston County, North Carolina, street let a basketball roll into the yard of a homeowner, who retrieved a gun from his house and fired, injuring a 6-year-old girl and her parents. Robert Louis Singletary, 24, has been charged in connection with the shooting.
That same day in Elgin, Texas, two high school cheerleaders were shot at a Texas supermarket parking lot after one of them mistakenly tried to get into the wrong car. The girls survived, though one was critically injured. Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., 25, was charged with felony deadly conduct.
In each case, the young victims meant no harm. They should have been encounters that ended with understanding and a brief exchange of pleasantries. Instead, they ended in violence. Needlessly.
Such encounters aren’t the norm, of course. But they reflect an increasingly twitchy, angry, fear-filled America paranoid about violence, and prone to instinctively reach for a firearm — even if the perceived peril doesn’t exist. Underpinning this paranoia is a toxic American political landscape that has sowed so much anger, fear and divisiveness.
There’s also a more immediate component that troubles us. At least some of these incidents, so-called wrong address shootings, point to the pitfalls of “stand your ground” laws, along with the legal tenet known as “castle doctrine.”
Stand your ground laws vary depending on the state, but in general they permit someone with a reasonable fear of being killed or seriously harmed to use lethal force in self-defense, rather than merely retreat in self-protection. Roughly 30 states have some form of a stand your ground law. Castle doctrine is a common law principle that justifies the use of deadly force by someone in order to protect their home, themselves and other people who live at that home.
Stand your ground laws were thrust into the spotlight in 2012, when Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, was shot to death by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer at a gated community near Orlando, Florida.
A jury acquitted Zimmerman of murder and manslaughter charges, essentially deciding he had acted in self-defense. We raised questions about such laws during the uproar over Martin’s death, and we are even more disturbed by them in the wake of the most recent wrong address shootings.
There’s nothing wrong with having laws on the books that uphold the right to self-defense — and give that right sensible boundaries.
But we fear that in America’s current divisive, armed-to-the-teeth climate, it’s too easy to use those laws as license to vent rage and hate, especially when racial prejudice is part of the mix.
An obvious need exists to define much more clearly what is and is not legally justifiable self-defense. And it’s clear that state legislatures should take a second look at stand-your-ground laws, and shelve them if they’re doing more harm than good.
We also hope that, as the 2024 election season approaches, the candidates make the healing of America a paramount mission. It may sound like fantasy, but by no means should it be.
A main perpetrator of America’s caustic dynamic is, of course, former President Donald Trump, whom we don’t expect to reform anytime soon. Trump will be Trump, which means he will continue to divide and foment because it’s a political strategy that has paid off for him. Or so he believes.
But everyone else in the race should realize that past political messaging has helped turn America into a country on edge — which means political messaging in the upcoming campaign should strive to unify. Neither side of American politics has made any strides toward that goal. When he became president, Joe Biden pledged to cleanse the country of its divisiveness, and it’s clear the country hasn’t moved the needle when it comes to unity.
This country has myriad problems and crises on its agenda, and they’ll all have their rightful place as campaign issues when election season rolls around. But this toxicity in how Americans interact with each other is deeply worrisome, which is why it should be at the forefront of crises that the 2024 presidential candidates must confront.