Don't let the shootings of innocent kids be justified

Last Thursday in Kansas City, Ralph Yarl, a Black kid of 16 who was a Science Olympiad competitor and talented marching band participant, went to pick up his little brothers. He wound up a block away from the correct address, rang the doorbell, and waited for some time. Finally an old white man, Andrew Lester, opened the main door--and immediately shot him through the glass storm door. Lester shouted, "Don't come around here no more," as Ralph staggered away with bullets in his skull and arm.

Then on Saturday in Hebron NY, friends in a group of two cars and a motorcycle were driving to a party when they went up the wrong driveway. They recognized the mistake, but as they were leaving, Kevin Monahan, 65, emerged from the house and shot at the vehicles, killing a passenger in one of the cars, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis.

Reporting has focused on how Ralph and Kaylin were "good kids" who wound up at the wrong house in the sort of minor mistake we all make regularly. Are none of us safe? (A reasonable question. The answer is no, though some of us are a lot less safe than others.)

What I want to draw your attention to is a commonality between the murderers, besides the fact that they are white men in the 65-and-older age bracket.

Andrew Lester, who shot Ralph, told the sheriff that he was "scared to death" at the time he pulled the trigger, as he felt old and frail, and Ralph was a large, menacing, Black man trying to invade his home. (Ralph appears to be a typical-sized teen and was waiting patiently on the porch.) Kevin Monahan's attorney stated that the vehicles were "speeding up the driveway" revving their engines and shining their lights, and that this "certainly caused some level of alarm to an elderly gentleman who had an elderly wife." (If Monahan's age of 65 isn't even social security retirement age anymore--that's 67--I don't think it counts as "elderly.")

Monahan's lawyer and friends of Andrew Lester say the very same thing: it is true that the victims were not actually out to harm the men who shot them. But the men are not murderers! They were engaged in self-defense against what they understandably perceived as dangerous threats. They are old and vulnerable. They were just doing what the law allows: standing their ground, defending their little castles. The outcome was a tragedy, not a crime. These were gentlemen, not criminals.

Let's get this out of the way: that's ridiculous. By that logic, you have a legal right to shoot to death people delivering packages to your home and startling you. Shoot all the honor roll kids you like, so long as they are Black and you find that scary. Shoot all the young women in cars you wish, so long as engine noise and headlights disturb the silence and solitude you prefer, and you believe that constitutes an attack.

Self-defense must refer to defense against an actual attack, or at a minimum actions that most people would reasonably perceive as an actual attack. It can't be based on racist fears of any Black person being in the vicinity. It can't be based on paranoid suspicion of absolutely anyone approaching (and leaving!) your home.

There are two questions we should be asking. The first is, why would we be seeing multiple assertions that old or middle-aged white men be excused from murder because they had irrational fears? And the second is, why are there more middle-aged-to-old white men full of so much irrational fear that they are shooting kids today?

Let's consider the second question first. Middle-aged and older white men in the U.S. today are the Fox News demographic. The Fox viewership has an average age of 68 and is two-thirds men, and Fox is the most-watched "news" source in the U.S. today. And we all know what they peddle: paranoia and outrage. A narrative that the U.S. is under siege, that civil war may be coming, that "patriots" must arm themselves. A vision of the U.S. as plagued by crime committed by brown people, where the "woke elites" seek to silence conservatives and sieze their guns, and "groomers" are sexualizing and "transing" children.

What does this do to people?

Back in 2018, the midterm election year of the Trump presidency, Fox News carried nonstop coverage of Trump's claims that "caravans" of migrants were approaching the U.S./Mexican border, intending to enter the U.S. illegally. Trump claimed that these "caravans" were full of murderers and rapists, whom Democrats embraced because they would illegally vote Democrat in upcoming elections. None of these things were true, but reports on these claims were pervasive on Fox for months on end.

For you, this may have just been noise you ignored. In one of my classes, a student noted that her grandmother, who lives in rural Wisconsin (about as far from the border with Mexico as you can get in the U.S.) had purchased a gun, and was afraid to leave her home, because she was convinced a horde of Spanish-speaking criminals were coming to rob and sexually assault her. Well before Covid, she was staying isolated at home, watching Fox News all day.

This led a bunch of other white students to chime in. They reported uncles who were not just voicing all sorts of conspiracy theories, but buying a lot of guns. They spoke of grandfathers saying openly racist things and expressing horror over the students' decision to go to college in Milwaukee, which they seemed to picture as an apocalyptic hellhole full of Black felons. The students were worried about the mental health of older people in their own families being negatively impacted by media. These included conservative talk radio and social media, but most especially Fox News.

This helps illustrate how a paranoia has been building for years in the U.S., especially among people who are older, who are men, who are white, who are MAGA-adherents. To be sure, there people who are younger, who are not men, who are not white, who are not MAGA, who have this paranoia. And you don't have to watch Fox to acquire it, because so many other people are watching Fox and adjacent media that others in related social networks get secondhand exposure. 

We do know that Lester "spent considerable time at home in a living room chair, watching conservative news programs at high volume." He had embraced conspiracy theories, and was spouting racist, homophobic, transphobic and anti-immigrant claims. And he "kept a large number of firearms in his home, including rifles and handguns."

So: here's a terrible idea! Let's make a whole segment of the population paranoid, and suspicious and fearful of folks who are Black or brown or Muslim or trans. Then let's give all those paranoid, fearful people guns. And then let's convey to them that the most admired heroes are those who use a gun to stop a criminal.

This last explains how we get to that first question I asked: why would older white men who use firearms to attempt or commit murders of innocent kids be referred to as "gentlemen" rather than "perpetrators"? Why, because they followed the commandment that good people stop bad ones by shooting them. It's as if they are soldiers in a civic war. Engaging in war is what real men do! And if in this case they wound up shooting someone innocent--well, that is a tragic element of war. Sometimes there is collateral damage; sometimes there is friendly fire. But soldiers are not charged with murder in these situations. Instead, we are told, they are to be pitied for the burden of guilt they now carry.

So that is the narrative that underlies these two recent shootings. Victim and offender are reversed according to the perpetrators. The powerful person--the adult white man with a gun--is presented as aged, weak and frail, and in need of defense. The disempowered victim--the unarmed, innocent young person--is said to have been perceived as a terrible threat. Ralph was Black and supposedly seemed menacing standing on the porch. Kailyn was riding in an ominous car with a "revving engine" and bright headlights.

As I said, shooting someone in self-defense is only a defense to murder if that person was actually attacking you, or reasonable people would agree that they seemed to present an imminent threat of serious bodily harm. I may have a phobia about clowns, but that doesn't give me license to murder people wearing clown outfits. A person may be a racist who sees all Black men as threats, or a transmisogynist who fears encountering trans women, but that doesn't give them the right to shoot them on sight, either.

What the perpetrators in these cases and their lawyers and other defenders are in essence saying is that paranoid fears that are legitimated by Fox News and its ilk should now be treated as reasonable. Shooting people wearing clown noses is irrational and murder, but shooting innocent Black boys is reasonable if tragic.

I believe we have to recognize this expansion of the doctrine of self-defense for what it is: something that will horrifically multiply the problem of gun violence in the U.S. if not shut down.

 Shut it down.