Everyday Mistakes, Turned Bloody and Deadly
Shannon Watts, the Founder of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots gun safety organization, summed up three violent gun attacks this past week:
Payton Washington is in the ICU after she was shot for getting in the wrong car in Texas
Kaylin Gillis was shot to death for driving into the wrong driveway in New York
Ralph Yarl was shot in the head for ringing the doorbell at the wrong house in Missouri
It’s the guns
All three incidents involve strangers firing upon young people who made the most ordinary of mistakes and wound up paying dearly for them.
The proliferation and availability of guns is a huge factor here. But these attacks are also a predictable result of a deadly combination of ills now thoroughly infecting our politics and our society. Let’s take a look at two in particular: extreme gun culture and dangerous, right-wing fear-mongering.
We’ve lost our damn minds in gun mania
The attacks shine a harsh light upon pro-gun culture, including “citizen justice” laws in a majority of U.S. states. Said Watts, “The combination of Shoot First Laws, open carry, and gun extremism promoted by the gun lobby have created a vigilante gun culture that encourages people to seek out dangerous situations and emboldens them to preemptively shoot people.”
In 29 states, Shoot First laws, also known misleadingly as Stand Your Ground laws, grant people a license to use deadly force and then to claim self-defense. Unsurprisingly, the laws tend to embolden and favor armed property owners while turning innocent and unarmed people, particularly Black and other minority Americans, into targets.
Kansas City, Missouri, where 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot in the head and then in the arm, has a Shoot First law on the books. The assailant, an 84-year old man named Andrew Lester, heard his doorbell ring around 9:30 p.m. Yarl had mistakenly gone to the wrong house, hoping to pick up his twin brothers. Lester claims he saw a “Black man” at his doorstep whom he believed was trying to gain entrance to his house. So Lester grabbed his gun and shot Yarl in the head, then fired again when Yarl fell to the ground. According to Yarl, who miraculously survived the attack, Lester had yelled “Don’t come around here.”
Because of the state’s Shoot First law, Lester was released less than two hours after being taken into custody that night. Police apparently believed Lester had a valid defense that he had feared for his life and that this fear may have justified his actions. It was only after sustained protests by clergy, state lawmakers and civil rights leaders drew national attention to the attack that authorities issued a warrant for Lester’s arrest. He is now charged with two felony counts including assault.
But even in states that do not have Shoot First laws, such as New York, property owners often take the law into their own hands with deadly consequences. That was what happened with Kaylin Gillis, who was traveling upstate with friends on rural roads in Washington County near Hebron, New York. She and three friends, who were attempting to find another friend’s house, made a wrong turn into the driveway of homeowner Kevin Monahan.
Unlike in Missouri, in New York a homeowner cannot legally fire first but has an obligation to retreat. Monahan, who was in his house at the time, was never in any discernible objective danger. As Gillis and her friends were leaving the property, having realized their error, Monahan stepped outside onto his porch and fired two bullets at the vehicle as it was driving away. One of the bullets struck Gillis. Her friends frantically sought to call 911, but cellular service was not available until they reached Salem five miles away. By then, emergency medical workers were unable to save her.
Police went to Monahan’s home but he would not come out, creating “a bit of a situation there,” according to reports. The standoff lasted one hour before Monahan surrendered. He was immediately charged with second degree murder.
For Payton Washington and Heather Roth, the Shoot First law in Texas may also have led to horrifying consequences. According to reports, the two young women were coming home from cheerleading practice when Roth got out of her friend’s car and opened the door to a vehicle in the carpool lot that she believed was hers. Instead, she saw a man sitting in the passenger seat. Roth panicked, believing a stranger was inside her car, and she retreated to her friend’s car.
The man then approached their car, and Roth rolled down the window to apologize, telling him she thought it was her car. Roth told police that the man then threw up his hands, pulled out a gun, and started shooting. Roth was grazed by a bullet, but Washington was shot in the leg and back and flown to a hospital where she is in critical condition.
Surveillance video led to the arrest of a suspect, 25-year old Pedro Tello Rodriguez, Jr., and police charged him with engaging in deadly conduct, a third-degree felony. It is unclear, yet likely, that Rodriguez will claim he was acting in self-defense under the circumstances—meaning someone he didn’t know got in his car, and then when he confronted them, someone rolled down the window. They could have had a gun, right?
The idea that many strangers are not only armed but will fire first, ask questions later, even in the most innocuous circumstances or after the most innocent mistakes, erodes our fundamental notions of freedom. This freedom is already under serious stress, as our public gathering places—schools, churches, groceries, movies theaters, concert venues, to name a few—repeatedly become the targets of mass shooters armed with military-style assault weapons.
But there is another toxic factor with which we must also now contend: the paranoia and mistrust that right-wing media outlets pump like poison into the minds of people armed with dangerous weapons.
Angry, isolated men
A picture is now emerging with at least two of the assailants in this trio of incidents.
Andrew Lester. Lester lives alone in his home in Kansas City, Missouri, after his wife recently moved to a nursing home. According to reporting by the New York Times, a relative said that Lester spent “considerable time at home in a living room chair, watching conservative news programs at high volume.” Despite living in a relatively crime-free neighborhood of fellow white conservatives, Lester somehow was still “scared to death” of being physically harmed—enough to grab a gun because his doorbell rang, and to shoot directly at someone merely standing on his porch.
According to one of Lester’s grandsons, who was interviewed by the Times, he and Lester had become estranged after Lester began embracing right-wing conspiracy theories, including a “ridiculous” one involving Dr. Anthony Fauci. Lester kept many firearms in the house and was allegedly prone to making disparaging remarks about Blacks, gays and immigrants. Another grandson, however, claimed it was inaccurate to describe Lester as extreme right-wing, but he refused to comment in detail. He instead portrayed Lester as “literally too nice” and as someone who “spoiled” his relatives. Both accounts could be true; it is not uncommon that those in the thrall of far-right propaganda and fear-mongering might also treat their immediate families with care and love.
Lester’s ex-wife, Mary Clayton, who hasn’t spoken to Lester in decades, remembers a more dangerous man. She described their 14-year marriage as “troubled.” A younger Lester was prone to fits of rage, breaking objects when angry. When she called police on him, they told her it was his home and he could do as he wished. “I was always scared of him,” Clayton said. “It doesn’t surprise me, what happened.”
Kevin Monahan. Monahan is 65 and lives with his wife on a 40-acre, mostly wooded plot in upstate New York. He loved dirt bikes and largely kept to himself, according to the Times. A neighbor who has known him for decades nevertheless described him as aggressive and intimidating. “He was a difficult guy,” the neighbor said, “known to have altercations with people.” Monahan was also “always concerned with trespassing.”
On the night of the shooting, Monahan’s lawyer claims that several vehicles were speeding up his driveway, with engines revving and lights shining. His lawyer claims this “certainly caused some level of alarm to an elderly gentleman who had an elderly wife”—playing up the fact, as with Lester in Kansas City, that age and delusion may have contributed to the shooting.
I should note that there isn’t any evidence yet that Monahan was a consumer of right-wing media, even if he fits that demographic profile. And like Lester’s more sympathetic grandson, his lawyer describes Monahan as a “decent person.” Monahan “feels terrible that someone lost their life,” he added. Left unanswered is how supposedly decent people come to act out the gate in such a hostile and violent way toward innocent strangers.
Fear, mistrust, and guns
In all three cases, the default assumption by the gun-wielder was not that an innocent human being had mistakenly entered their personal zones. It was that someone dangerous, who might pose a threat to them, deserved to be shot first. That lack of trust in fellow humans isn’t something that we’re born with; it’s something that is drilled into people, in many cases over and over by networks like Fox and OAN that feed off fear, anger and hatred. It takes a concerted and sustained effort to dehumanize fellow citizens while glorifying gun culture to the point where ringing a doorbell, driving up a driveway, or getting in the wrong car by mistake leads to an immediate shooting with serious and often deadly consequences.
The fear and mistrust bred by right-wing media becomes supercharged when the innocent party is Black. This was made clear in the case of teenager Ralph Yarl. According to reports, after being shot in the head and arm, Yarl ran to three different homes in Lester’s neighborhood begging for help. At the third, Yarl was instructed to lie on the ground and put his hands in the air. Yarl complied, and then passed out.
In a nation where guns now outnumber citizens, the last thing we need is to see fear and mistrust among the populace stoked any further. But the same forces and interests that demand lax gun laws and fetishize gun ownership are those that also work ceaselessly to divide and destabilize society. After all, a fearful America is a more armed America, and that’s good business for the gun and ammunition manufacturers. It’s also good business for the networks that cynically profit by keeping Americans glued to their television sets while looking askance at their fellow citizens. It is in short a dangerous, symbiotic doom cycle—with increasingly deadly consequences.
“Monahan “feels terrible that someone lost their life,” he added.”
Of course Monaghan blames the victim. But she didn’t “lose her life”, as if it were something SHE misplaced. HE violently stole it from her.
We need to make sure Monahan and reporters and anyone else who comments on this get called out whenever they try to downplay the violence in this way.
I always enjoy your work, but I think this is one of your best pieces ever. We are not born hating and fearing each other. I have watched my elderly grandfather get sucked into the right wing echo chamber and turn from outgoing and gregarious to paranoid and angry. I do think age and the mental declines that go with it play a part. It makes him easier prey to all of that messaging like these older men.