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Trigger-happy Americans have left their country in absolute shambles.

While the US is now synonymous with mass shootings (particularly school related), having dealt with a total of 695 shooting events in 2022 and 135 in 2023 already, a new gun-obsessed pattern has emerged of people being shot for making the most ordinary and unavoidable mistakes.

Turning up at the wrong place is not a crime, and yet, in the span of six days, four people in America were shot for accidentally ringing the wrong doorbells and getting into the wrong cars.

Headlines have been devastated by the news of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl who rang the wrong doorbell, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis who arrived on the wrong driveway, and two cheerleaders who were shot at in a parking lot when they accidentally opened the wrong car door. AP News sums it up:

In Missouri last Thursday, a Kansas City teen (Ralph) was shot twice after going to the wrong home to pick up his younger brothers, raising questions about the state’s “stand your ground law” and heightening racial tensions.

The honours student mixed up the addresses and died for it, showing up at the home of the paranoid Andrew Lester, 84, instead of going to 115th Terrace:

Thankfully, the wounded teen is recovering at home, but his mother said the trauma is evident. Meanwhile, Lester was charged with first-degree assault on Monday and turned himself in on Tuesday. Some are calling for him to be charged with a hate crime.

Then, on Saturday night, a group looking for a friend’s house in upstate New York arrived in the wrong driveway only for one of them to be shot to death:

Kaylin Gillis, 20, was traveling through the rural town of Hebron with three other people Saturday night when the group turned onto a property that was not the friend’s house they were looking for, authorities said. They were met with gunfire in the driveway.

The group was trying to turn the car around when the homeowner, Kevin Monahan, 65, came out onto his porch and fired two shots, according to Washington County Sheriff Jeffrey Murphy.

Unfortunately, Gillis was killed by one round of gunfire.

Last but probably not least, on Tuesday, a man shot and wounded two cheerleaders outside a Texas supermarket after one of them said she mistakenly got into his car thinking it was her own:

The shooting in Elgin, east of Austin, happened early Tuesday in an area that serves as a carpool pickup spot for members of the Woodlands Elite Cheer Company, team owner Lynne Shearer said.

Heather Roth said she got out of her friend’s car and into a vehicle she thought was hers, but there was a stranger in the passenger seat, KTRK-TV reported. She said she panicked and got back into her friend’s car, but the man (suspected to be 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr.) got out of his vehicle and approached. She said she tried to apologize through her friend’s car window, but the man threw up his hands, pulled out a gun and opened fire.

Roth was grazed by a bullet while her teammate Payton Washington, 18, was shot in the leg and back.

 

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Although these shootings have drawn attention because they are so extreme and in such quick succession, this kind of gun violence is not at all rare in ‘Great’ America.

If anything, these cases point to the “stand your ground” laws fueling a belief that trigger-happy people can use guns defensively “anytime they perceive a threat,” said Jonathan Metzl, who directs Vanderbilt University’s Department of Medicine, Health and Society.

The Guardian notes how the increase in gun violence has put everyone on edge, while “an uptick in impulsive, explosive, trigger-happy rage ramps up the fear and paranoia that has us warily eyeing our fellow passengers and shoppers”.

Everything we hear, read and observe for ourselves about the deep divisions in our country comes with a more or less veiled threat: the other side is out to get us. While the right confronts the specter of Ruby Ridge, of Randy Weaver’s wife and child killed by FBI agents, the left is haunted by racially motivated murders and random mass homicides. Anyone could start shooting at any moment as we remain locked in a series of struggles: red v blue, white v Black, men v women.

The cowboy chromosome, to shoot first and ask questions later, is deep set in America’s DNA and limiting access to guns might not be an end to all this madness.

What needs to change is the ‘us versus them’ narrative, but lord knows that might not happen in this lifetime. Not while bigots like Donald Trump and Andrew Tate live among us, at least.

[source:guardian&ap]