In frightened, paranoid, gun-crazed America, the real ‘stranger danger’ is to strangers

This is how fast things seem to be devolving in gun-crazed America. It’s been barely a week since we were stunned by the news that Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old honors student who accidentally rang the wrong doorbell at a Kansas City home, was shot in the head by the 84-year-old homeowner who answered the door.

Just a few days later, a man was shooting to kill at a six-year-old girl and her parents, because his property had been violated...by a basketball. Authorities in Gaston County, N.C. say that a 24-year-old man became so angry that the ball bounced into his yard that he emerged with a gun and started shooting, yelling “I’m going to kill you” at little Kinsley White and her parents. The girl needed stitches from bullet fragments, while her dad is hospitalized.

Ralph and Kinsley are on the road to recovery. Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old from rural upstate New York, wasn’t so lucky. She was a passenger in one of two cars struggling to find a party in a neighborhood of gravel roads and no cell service when they entered the wrong driveway — and 65-year-old Kevin Monahan fired into her vehicle, killing her. The county sheriff has said Monahan, charged with second-degree murder, “has shown no remorse.”

It’s horrifying because these fatal or near-fatal encounters are just the everyday mistakes that all of us make from time-to-time. Just the other day I was at the local big-box store when for a split second I pulled on the door of a black Hyundai identical to my own. How fortunate for me I wasn’t in Oak Ridge, Texas, where 18-year-old Payton Washington, a member of a traveling cheerleader squad, briefly tried to get in the wrong car in a supermarket after practice, and the owner came out and shot her and a teammate, leaving Washington critically wounded.

The array of toxins poured into American life are starting to blend in alarming ways, and now they are killing us.

Is it the guns, in the only nation in the world that had more firearms than people even before the insane buying binge triggered by the pandemic?

Is it the fear and paranoia over crime, where spikes in murder and some crime categories in some cities amid the disruptions of the pandemic has fueled distortions and fearmongering on media outlets like Fox News, with its un-journalistic mission to tag Democrats as “soft on crime,” and on panic-inducing websites like NextDoor?

Is it racism — Yarl is Black and his assailant is white (with “racist tendencies,” according to his own grandson), while in North Carolina a Black gunman went after a white family — as well as the heightened distrust of our civil-war-level political divisions, which turns unfamiliar strangers into a dangerous “Other” who is to be feared?

Or is it just our muddled feelings about privacy, in a world where people feel with real justification that sites like Google and Facebook and their advertisers, among others, have way too much information about them, and where technology and trends like the ability to work from home has only made us more isolated, alienated, and suspicious of the strangers we meet?

The sudden rash of high-profile stranger shootings is one of those events that is shocking — yet also surprising that it didn’t happen sooner. Most Americans are outraged for the victims, but we shouldn’t take solace in the fact that most of us are still unlikely to be shot for our parking-lot or driveway mistakes. That’s because these shootings are just the extreme leading edge of something that’s hurting all of us: a new American age of paranoia.

In many ways, it’s becoming impossible to have a robust democracy and healthy civic life when we are this fearful and suspicious of every stranger we encounter. Even before the shock headlines of the last week, I’ve been pondering this problem because of the profound impact on the arena of civic life that I’m personally involved in: journalism. Most people reading this probably agree that a free press is essential for a free and open society, yet we rarely talk about the fact that good journalism — the kind not dependent on often dishonest official sources, like police — means talking to strangers. Which is darn near impossible in 2023.

» READ MORE: A passive media will be a ‘contributing factor’ on U.S. democracy’s death certificate

When I started at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1995, the newspaper’s bread-and-butter was what we called “house ends,” going house to house and ringing doorbells in neighborhoods where some awful crime had taken place. This happens less, not just because there aren’t enough reporters but also because no one knows their neighbors anymore and it’s not worth the risk of getting shot, like Ralph Yarl was, for such little information. Then we’ve got technology that’s blocking our access to others: spam folders, call blockers. Even The Inquirer’s newsroom Gmail account sends a freak-out alert when we simply try to contact some college professor or a civic activist for the first time.

Journalism suffers, but so does much of our public life. How can political candidates or community crusaders build a coalition in an America where ringing a doorbell could turn deadly? (And also when it’s no longer possible to accurately poll public opinion?) We’ve already seen how it’s getting hard to hold a simple school board meeting in a country wracked by such paranoia. And this week’s wave of publicity over the four shooting incidents — and counting — is only going to make these problems even worse.

This has been a long time coming. The fearmongering of “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism (pioneered right here in Philadelphia) is 50 years old now, and its insidious impact on U.S. society was spotlighted a generation ago in Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine. That era coincided with the transition of the National Rifle Association from a sporting organization to a political monstrosity that metastasized from guns for personal protection to a celebration of AR-15s. The pandemic, when lines at gun stores snaked around neighborhoods, has made matters much, much worse — on the highways, at “Sweet 16″ parties, and now at a doorbell.

You can’t easily put this back in the bottle. Even if we got our act together and enacted new gun-safety laws — an absolute necessity, to thwart young killers like the Louisville bank employee who bought an assault rifle days before his rampage — there would still be more than 400 million guns in circulation. And the decades of ratings-driven and often racist TV-fearmongering that older white men like the Kansas City and upstate New York shooters were surely exposed to cannot be unseen.

What America really needs is even harder to get to: a whole new paradigm about privacy and community. Somehow, we need to figure how to stop the unwarranted and obnoxious invasions of our privacy — like the online tracking of our whereabouts or the bombardment of internet ads about our embarrassing rash or whatever — so that the essential day-to-day interactions of community can continue to take place.

The kindness of strangers is certainly a virtue, but it’s much more than that. Democracy can’t function if we can no longer talk to unfamiliar people. I am reminded of the Sen. Bernie Sanders line that was the crescendo of his 2020 campaign rallies, when he asked his followers: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” It’s the height of idealism — but especially in a broken United States where people now are much more likely to fight against someone they don’t know.

Things need to change, somehow. I noted that as I was writing this on Thursday morning, CNN has coined a new term for the sudden rash of incidents: “wrong place shootings.” Maybe that works for now. But in an America where neighbor can no longer talk to neighbor, and where the real “stranger danger” isn’t from strangers but to them, everywhere suddenly feels like the wrong place.

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