In a nation where strangers are all too often seen as threats, simple acts like ringing the wrong doorbell can seem like a fateful question of trust.
A keep out sign is posted on a home, Wednesday, April 19, 2023, near the house where 84-year-old Andrew Lester shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl a week earlier in Kansas City, Mo.
“But I don’t think that’s the culture we have right now,” Moyer said. “There’s a lot of fear in our country.”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.
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.
“The fear has to be justified by the circumstances,” he said. “You don’t get to kill somebody just because you fear them.”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.
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