Shoot First, Ask Questions Later

Stand your ground shooting over a parking space

“As a nation, we are moving faster and faster in this direction where people think

they have the right to shoot anyone who approaches them in any way while falsely

believing we’re under increased danger… In reality, things are much different.”

Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a criminal law professor at the University of Dayton.

“I don’t think the problem is law-abiding gun owners…

I think the problem is criminals who go and shoot people.”

MAGA Republican Senator Josh Hawley (Missouri)

People are scared. In the first two years of the Biden administration, the FBI received 39 million requests for gun-buyer background checks, a significant multiple from either the Obama or Trump administrations. Fear of crime. Fear that their guns are about to be taken away. Fear of other people with guns. People are killing just to make a point of how easy it is to kill. “The shooter who killed five co-workers at a Louisville, Kentucky, bank this month left notes that revealed part of his goal was to show how easy it was in America for someone dealing with a serious mental illness to buy an assault-style weapon. The gunman purchased the AR-15-style rifle seven days before the April 10 shooting after quickly passing a records check.” CNN News Feed, April 21st.

Nationwide, the only major violent gun homicides that are on the increase involve mass shootings or shootings that are “justified” under a litany of red state variations of “stand your ground” gun laws. People operating under these ill-conceived statutes believe that they do not have to try and avoid violent confrontation and are justified killing if they “feel” threatened in that confrontation. States that treat a home as an individual’s castle, which can be protected by an otherwise imprudent use of a firearm, often produce people who kill those who are on their property (but not intruders) without really determining any real, hostile intent. When racial bias enters the tent, an old white senior is threatened simply by the appearance of Black teen ringing his doorbell.

With more guns than people in this country (estimated at 350 million, including almost 30 million AR-15 level assault weapons), the saddest part of the above rise in public fear is that the mere proliferation of guns has led millions to buy guns to protect themselves against those who have them. One of the main planks of the MAGA-helmed GOP is that Dems have presided over a massive rise in crimes in those “big cities.” In my recent It’s a Crime How Politicians Deal with Crime blog, I point out how GOP politicians with higher crime rates in their own districts continue to lambast cities like San Francisco and New York as ravaged by out-of-control crime… which actually have much lower crimes-per-thousand-residents. But this constant stoking of fears has found traction, regardless of the facts.

The result: more guns in civilian hands killing more people than ever before. Really inane shootings like: “A North Carolina man accused of shooting and wounding a 6-year-old girl and her parents after children went to retrieve a basketball that had rolled into his yard was arrested in Florida on Thursday [4/20] afternoon, authorities said.” Associated Press, April 21st.

As Jack Healy, Glenn Thrush, Eliza Fawcett and Susan C. Beachy, point out, writing for the April 20th Los Angeles Times, there are way too many “ooops I’m sorry” gun homicides. “The maintenance man in North Carolina had just arrived to fix damage from a leak. The teenager in Georgia was only looking for his girlfriend’s apartment. The cheerleader in Texas simply wanted to find her car in a dark parking lot after practice.

“Each of them accidentally went to the wrong address or opened the wrong door — and each was shot. They had made innocent mistakes that became examples of the kind of deadly errors that can occur in a country bristling with guns, anger and paranoia, and where most states have empowered gun owners with new self-defense laws.

“[In just one week in mid-April], the issue of ‘wrong address’ shootings stirred protests and widespread outrage after a homeowner in Kansas City, Mo., shot a 16-year-old who rang the wrong doorbell. Days later, a 20-year-old woman in upstate New York was fatally shot after she and her friends turned into the wrong driveway. And then two cheerleaders in Texas were shot after one got into the wrong car in a dark parking lot.

“But many other cases have attracted far less attention. In July 2021, a Tennessee man was charged with brandishing a handgun and firing it after two cable-company workers mistakenly crossed onto his land. Last June, a Virginia man was arrested after the authorities say he shot at three lost teenage siblings who had accidentally pulled onto his property.

“‘It’s shoot first, ask questions later,’ said Justin Diepenbrock, who lives in Polk County, Fla., where the authorities say a father and son searching for what they thought was a burglar opened fire last year on a woman parking her car after working an overnight shift… The catalyst? The neighbors charged in the shooting had spotted Mr. Diepenbrock on a doorbell camera leaving mistakenly delivered medication at their front door, according to court records’…

“Each one of these incidents resulted from unique events. But activists and researchers say they stem from a convergence of bigger factors — increased fear of crime and an attendant surge in gun ownership, increasingly extreme political messaging on firearms, fearmongering in the media and marketing campaigns by the gun industry that portray the suburban front door as a fortified barrier against a violent world… ‘The gun lobby markets firearms as something you need to defend yourself — hammers in search of nails,’ said Jonathan Lowy, a lawyer and gun-violence activist who has sued gun manufacturers on behalf of the victims of mass shootings and their families…

“The effect of self-defense laws protecting homeowners and gun owners is fiercely debated, with proponents arguing that their mere presence deters criminal behavior or civil disorder. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, recently invoked the state’s ‘stand your ground’ law in asking the state pardon board to reverse the conviction of a man who claimed he killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020 because he felt threatened.

“But several large-scale studies have suggested that the laws have few benefits, increase the likelihood of gun violence and might discriminate against minority groups, especially Black people… According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which supports gun control, shootings in which white people shot Black people were nearly three times as likely to be found ‘justified’ compared with cases where white people shot other white people.

“A 2023 analysis of recent academic research by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation found no evidence that such laws had the deterrent effect that their sponsors claimed, and there was some indication, while not conclusive, that the laws might account for some increases in gun violence… There are no reliable local or national statistics for the use of firearms in self-defense, and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which studies crime data, found that weapons were actually more likely to be used in suicides, discharged accidentally, stolen or brandished in domestic disputes, than used to fend off an external attack.” The only consistent statistics I could find is that only one out of thirty civilian gun homicides, on average, is legally “justifiable.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and either a bad guy or a good guy with angry intentions can always kill more people more efficiently with a gun; there are no sane arguments against vastly greater gun control.