Two nights after a Black teenager mixed up “terrace” and “street” while trying to pick up his younger brothers from a friend’s house in suburban Kansas City, a car with a 20-year-old white woman from Schuylerville turned into the wrong rural driveway in Washington County searching for a friend’s party. Both young people were shot – Ralph Yarl, the 16-year-old in Kansas City, severely wounded, Kaylin Gillis, the 20-year-old in Hebron, killed one week ago Saturday.
While the racial component has been central to the national conversation about the Kansas City shooting, in which a white 84-year old shot a Black teenager, the tragedy 60 miles northeast of Schenectady — which shares so many similarities aside from racial overtones — reveals the culprit behind these shootings that took place 1,300 miles apart.
It’s the guns.
And not only is it the guns themselves, it’s the culture surrounding guns and gun ownership. As long as this exists, and as long as media outlets and politicians are willing to provide this culture a megaphone in the name of profit and power, our country and our communities will continue to be racked by gun violence.
The shooting in Hebron, a town of roughly 1,800, could just as easily have happened in small towns across our region, in Duanesburg, in Perth, in Canajoharie.
As if we needed any more proof that tragedy would recur, two teenage cheerleaders were shot in Texas this week after one of them mistook the shooter’s car for her own in a parking lot.
The obvious point is that shootings literally can’t happen without guns. At least, this should be an obvious point. But it’s one our country hasn’t seemed to have accepted.
America has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world by a factor of more than two and consequently ranks fourth among big countries in death rates due to firearms, behind only Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. How can anyone believe guns aren’t a cause of rampant gun violence?
Beyond the guns themselves, though, it’s the culture surrounding firearms that ensures harm continues to happen.
Gun ownership is often rooted in fear.
Research shows that “a general fear of crime, independent of actual or even perceived individual risk, may be a powerful motivator for gun ownership for some,” according to a 2019 analysis in the scientific journal “Nature.”
Gallup research on gun ownership confirms this point. In 2000, 65% of gun owners cited protection against crime as a reason to own a gun. By 2021, the percentage climbed to 88%. Meanwhile, hunting as a purpose for gun ownership has fallen slightly over two decades – from 59% in 2000 to 56% in 2021.
Self-protection was no doubt a reason the shooters in Kansas City and in Hebron owned guns.
Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old in Kansas City, told police he thought someone was breaking into his home before he fired his .32-caliber handgun at a kid who never even crossed the front door’s threshold. Kevin Monahan, the 65-year-old who allegedly fired at a vehicle leaving his home, killing Gillis, was extremely protective of his domain, posting warning signs about private property and at one point stringing a chain across the driveway, according to reporting by The New York Times.
Owning a gun only further feeds into a person’s fear.
“The gun’s purpose is violence,” Gretchen Schmidt, a criminologist and the department chair of Public Administration and Leadership at Excelsior University in Albany, told me. “The ‘weapon effect’ is that the presence of guns alone has been found to increase aggressiveness in some. You kind of work this all up in your own mind, and it feeds into your aggressiveness and your paranoia.”
Compounding all of this is that many gun rights advocates routinely prop up this fear and are given a platform on some radio and television outlets. Take, for example, what U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik was up to this past week. While she released a short, tepid statement about her heart breaking for the loss of Gillis, who lives in Stefanik’s own village, the congresswoman heavily touted forceful statements she made about the “catastrophic crime crisis across America.”
This fear-mongering, on which select national media outlets have been all too happy to capitalize, is a complete misrepresentation of the truth. While data show some crimes are up in recent years, the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services’ index crime data, which factors in seven major crime categories defined by the FBI, shows crime today has fallen by more than half compared to the crime of the early 1990s.
That’s not what Stefanik, whose husband works for the The National Shooting Sports Foundation, and other gun rights advocates want you to believe. Gun manufacturers and the gun lobby want people to be fearful, because when people are fearful they buy guns.
And, oh, do they buy guns. Americans buy billions of dollars worth of guns.
Adding to this is that gun manufacturers have developed marketing strategies linking gun ownership to a person’s individual identity, for instance running advertising campaigns that tell young men owning AR-15-style guns is a way for them to showcase their masculinity.
The drumbeat about crime spiking and guns being the best means of self-protection is then incessantly hammered into consumers of certain media, hour after hour.
“They are watching news on a loop, and they start to get these almost paranoid, aggressive ideals, and then something happens that triggers – almost validates – those thoughts,” said Excelsior criminologist Schmidt. “There’s this theory of the contagion effect, where we see these things over and over and over again, and we just think that’s how we’re supposed to react.”
And, so, the feedback loop continues.
Then, after every major incident of gun violence, the same cycle repeats: Local and national politicians who support gun rights say now is not the time to talk about guns. But this week should have been exactly that time. With these shootings, gun rights folks can’t place the blame on mental health or point to young, immature men with still-developing frontal lobes.
In Kansas City and in Hebron, the shooters were gun owners who deployed the weapons they’d purchased for their own protection to disastrous consequences – not just for the families they’ve irrevocably harmed, but for themselves. Both men could face significant time behind bars.
So how can we put an end to all of this?
One thought is to perhaps curtail the ways in which gun manufacturers are allowed to advertise, much in the way restrictions exist on tobacco advertising and in the way some elected officials want to place limits on mobile sports betting ads. If a gun is truly meant for hunting, should the gunmaker be allowed to use messaging linking the weapon to anything else?
Meanwhile, Schmidt suggests changing our legal system to expedite high-profile violent cases so they don’t stay in the news and wreak trauma for years on end.
“The benefit of expediting high-profile cases while protecting due process is getting the consequence more closely connected to the event to make a stronger psychological impact,” Schmidt said. “If people only see the continual violence and don’t connect consequences, that has an impact.”
Of course, no change will matter so long as the propaganda of gun culture continues on some media outlets. As long as the trumpeting of falsehoods and unfounded fears about crime continues to be profitable, America will continue to have more guns than people and continue to deal with the devastating ramifications.
Sadly, any hope that spreading lies on the news could lead to true accountability suffered a major setback this week. This was supposed to be the start of the trial in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. The trial would have exposed Fox’s lies. It would have placed the network’s personalities and executives on the stand, where they would have had to publicly defend their decisions to knowingly spread falsehoods and conspiracy theories to do with the 2020 presidential election.
Instead, Fox settled for nearly $800 million, admitting only that it agreed with the court’s finding that “certain claims about Dominion” were false. Fox issued no apology, no acknowledgment of fault. The deal will be forgotten in a way the public spectacle of a trial couldn’t have been.
With this settlement, media organizations with loyal followers were sent the message that paying for the right to spread disinformation in the name of bolstering their own empire is merely the cost of doing business.
As a result, all of us continue to pay a heavy price.
Columnist Andrew Waite can be reached at [email protected] and at 518-417-9338. Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.
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