Showing up to the wrong place at the wrong time shouldn’t invite gunfire.
In the last few days, four Americans have been shot — one fatally – for making a mundane error. Two cheerleaders were shot by a man outside a Texas supermarket after one mistakenly got in his car, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot for showing up at the wrong house in Kansas City, and in upstate New York, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis pulled into the wrong driveway, and was killed by gunfire.
This violence has put a spotlight on “stand your ground” laws — and the thoughtless rapidity with which people pull the trigger.
The first resort
As Jonathan Metzl, who directs Vanderbilt University’s Department of Medicine, Health and Society, tells AP, this form of gun violence isn’t uncommon, but it reveals how swiftly people resort to arms.
“Stand your ground” laws have contributed to the belief that people can use guns in self-defense “anytime they perceive a threat,” he says.
This was demonstrated with brutal clarity last week when Ralph Yarl, a high school junior, mistakenly went to the wrong home while picking up his younger twin brothers on April 13. He arrived outside a house on Northeast 115 Street, instead of Northeast 115th Terrace and the homeowner, Andrew Lester, shot him in the head.
As Lester later told the police, he didn’t exchange any words with Yarl before shooting him through the glass of his exterior door. In his probable cause statement, Lester explained that he was “scared to death,” and that “he believed he was protecting himself from a physical confrontation and could not take the chance of the male coming in.” This was despite the lack of any aggression from Yarl, who is Black. Even more disturbing, Lester, who is 84, didn’t stop at shooting Yarl in the head — he followed up by shooting Yarl again in the arm.
A defensive mindset
Deaths by gun violence are a tragically common occurrence in the United States. According to the Gun Violence Archive, nearly 13,000 people have died as a result of gun violence in 2023 alone. More than half of those deaths were suicides. More than 450 of the people killed by guns so far this year were just 12 to 17 years old, and 77 were children aged between 0-11.
Typically (and understandably) the media tends to focus on mass shootings, and in particular the premeditated school shootings that steal the lives of children. The concentration of shootings in alleged “self-defense” in the last few days has pulled focus, but though that focus is unusual, these aggressions are also incredibly common. They highlight not only the subjectivity of what constitutes “self-defense,” but also the mindset behind who owns guns, and why.
There are more guns than people in America — about 1.2 guns per person — but gun ownership is still relatively concentrated, and specific. About 30% of Americans own a gun, and they are most likely to be white, male, and Republican.
According to a 2017 survey by Pew Research Center, 48% of white men say they own a gun. By comparison, just 24% of White women and 24% of non-White men said they owned a gun, while women of color are the least likely demographic to possess guns, with ownership hovering at 16%.
Pew found that two-thirds of gun owners cite protection as a key motivation for owning a gun, while a 2021 Gallup survey found that 88 percent of people cited protection against crime as a primary factor. About three-quarters of gun owners see gun ownership as integral to their freedom, per Pew.
The dangers of relying on individuals’ judgment
“Stand your ground” laws, which exist in about 30 states, have a close relationship with the so-called “castle doctrine.” The castle doctrine, which has evolved over centuries, assumes that a person’s home is their castle, and that they’ve therefore got a right to protect it. This allows people the presumption of self-defense if they harm an intruder, even if they use deadly force.
As The New York Times notes, stand your ground laws go even further, applying this right to self-defense to any place where an individual has a right to be. This stands in contrast with the old “duty to retreat,” which characterized deadly force as justifiable only when there is no other option.
According to Florida state law, “a person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
As we’ve seen in recent days however, the utility of these laws depends heavily both on individuals’ subjective interpretation of their circumstances, and their attitude to the use of weapons in the first place. This leaves enormous scope both for error and the manifestation of dangerous prejudices.
For example, Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in the head, described Yarl as “six feet tall” when he was explaining the fear he felt upon seeing Yarl at the doorway. Yarl is 5’8, and Black. After announcing charges against Lester on Monday, Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson told reporters that he could “tell you there was a racial component in this case.”
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas told CNN This Morning that he believes Lester’s actions make him a “threat to the public.”
“I don’t know what house he’s in right now. I don’t know if that’s a house that the next Amazon driver or postal worker or campaign worker may knock on the door for,” Lucas said. “And then what? And then what does somebody have to worry about?”
Meanwhile, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan from upstate New York has apparently shown “no remorse” for the death of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis. He’d fired shots from his porch at two cars and a motorcycle as they were driving away. Gillis was in one of those cars.
Austin suspect Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., 25, apparently opened fire while the two young cheerleaders Heather Roth and Payton Washington were trying to apologize for their error.
“I see the guy get out of the passenger door, and I rolled my window down, and I was trying to apologize to him,” Heather Roth said, according to CNN’s report. “And then halfway, my window was down, and he just threw his hands up, and then he pulled out a gun and he just started shooting at all of us.”
