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In this
photo
provided
by
Baylor
University,
Payton
Washington
poses in
an
undated
photo
wearing
Baylor
University
attire.
Washington
was one
of two
cheerleaders
shot and
wounded
by a man
in a
Texas
supermarket
parking
lot
after
one of
them
said she
mistakenly
got into
his car
thinking
it was
her own.
(Baylor
University
via AP) |
|
Distrust
in
America:
Small
mistakes,
deep
fear —
and
gunfire
By TIM
SULLIVAN
and
AARON
MORRISON
apnews.com
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.
All of
them,
and
dozens
more
across
America,
were met
by
gunfire.
Some
were
injured,
some
killed.
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.
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.
“I want
to be
welcoming
and
inviting
to
anyone
that
comes to
my home.
Even if
they are
asking
for help
and I
can’t
help
them I’m
going to
be kind
to them.
I think
that’s
the way
everyone
should
be,”
Moyer
said.
“But I
don’t
think
that’s
the
culture
we have
right
now,”
Moyer
said.
“There’s
a lot of
fear in
our
country.”
There is
also
plenty
of
mistrust.
AMERICAN
SUSPICION
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
— even
in years
when it
is going
down —
and also
wildly
overestimate
their
chances
of being
a crime
victim.
“Part of
that is
you
guys,”
said
Warren
Eller, a
professor
at the
John Jay
College
of
Criminal
Justice,
referring
to the
media’s
relentless
focus on
crime.
“We get
24 hours
a day of
all the
dangers
out
there.”
That’s
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.
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.
And yet
in just
six days
in
April,
four
young
people
across
the U.S.
were
shot —
and the
woman in
New York
killed —
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.
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.
Take the
legal
issues.
Shooters
in
incidents
like
these
often
use
defenses
based on
“stand-your-ground”
laws,
which
have
broadened
people’s
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.
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.
“I think
it has
commonly
become
known of
as a
license
to use
deadly
force
whenever
someone
feels
threatened,”
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.
“The
fear has
to be
justified
by the
circumstances,”
he said.
“You
don’t
get to
kill
somebody
just
because
you fear
them.”
AGGRAVATING
FACTORS
Legal
experts
expect
Andrew
Lester,
the
84-year-old
man who
shot
Yarl, to
claim
self-defense
and cite
Missouri’s
stand-your-ground
law. On
Wednesday,
he
pleaded
not
guilty
in
Yarl’s
shooting.
Corn, a
22-year-military
veteran,
also
wonders
about
America’s
recent
boom in
firearm
sales
and
whether
it has
combined
with
insufficient
training
to
compound
the
problem.
“What
troubles
me isn’t
that
there
are a
lot of
firearms,
it’s
that
nothing
is
required
of
someone
who
takes on
the
awesome
responsibility”
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.
When he
was in
the
military,
he had
weeks of
training
before
he was
even
allowed
to touch
a
bullet.
“I was
always
conscious
of the
awesome
killing
power of
a
firearm,”
he said.
Then
there is
the
unavoidable
question
of race,
a
central
pillar
of
American
distrust
across
the
centuries.
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.
Yarl’s
shooting
has
drawn
comparisons
to the
2012
shooting
death of
Trayvon
Martin,
17, a
Black
teenager
visiting
his
father’s
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’s
stand-your-ground
law as a
defense.
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.
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.
“No one
is born
fearing
another
person
because
of their
skin
color,”
Kendi
said.
“There’s
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.”
“The
more we
unlearn
that
idea and
realize
that we
can’t
attach
danger
to skin
color in
any
way,” he
said,
“the
less
likely
people
are
going to
be to
use
lethal
force
against
a
16-year-old
child
who is
ringing
their
doorbell.”
____
This
story
has been
corrected
to show
the
Kansas
City
rally
was held
at the
federal
courthouse,
not
police
headquarters.
___
AP
researcher
Rhonda
Shafner
in New
York and
writer
Margaret
Stafford
in
Kansas
City,
Missouri
contributed
to this
report.
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