Our new terror: The ‘law-abiding’ gun owner who is ready to kill
Andrew Lester is not a drug kingpin or a mafia don or an international spy being hunted by assassins. But when his doorbell rang one evening more than a week ago in Kansas City, Mo., the 84-year-old went to answer with a gun in his hand. When he saw a Black teenager at the door, he told investigators, he was “scared to death.” So he shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl twice. There to pick up his younger siblings, Yarl had come to the wrong address.
Two days later in Upstate New York, a group of friends pulled into the wrong driveway. The homeowner came out of his house and shot at them, killing Kaylin Gillis, age 20. Three days after that, a cheerleader in Texas got into the wrong car, thinking it was her friend’s; the man in the car followed her out and shot her and another cheerleader.
In Nashville, a Walgreens employee opened fire in the parking lot on two women he suspected of shoplifting. Police say “he was in fear and didn’t know if they were armed.”
The full details of these cases are not yet known, but they highlight something at the heart of gun culture that receives little attention: fear. More specifically, the fear that pulses in the hearts of so many supposedly “law-abiding” gun owners.
I’m afraid of mass shootings. I’m afraid of getting caught in the crossfire of some stupid beef. I’m afraid of gun-wielding, right-wing extremists. But increasingly, I’m also afraid of the people who believe themselves to be “good guys” with guns, gripped with terror of the world around them and ready to kill.
That so many gun owners are consumed with fear is not an accident. It is a central part of the ideology propagated by conservative media outlets and gun advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association.
The message is hammered home again and again: The world is full of homicidal maniacs coming to kill you and your family. In the words of NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, “every day of every year, innocent, good, defenseless people are beaten, bloodied, robbed, raped and murdered.” Criminals, gangs, home invaders, terrorists, antifa — they’re all coming for you. So if your doorbell rings, you’d better have a gun in your hand when you answer.
The recent NRA convention in Indianapolis was touted by the group as “14 Acres of Guns & Gear!” But it might as well have been “14 Acres of Guns & Fear!” Former president Donald Trump told the crowd that liberals “want to take away your guns while throwing open the jailhouse doors and releasing bloodthirsty criminals into your communities.” One speaker after another echoed that idea.
This has become the core of the gun industry’s marketing efforts in recent years: to convince potential buyers that sooner or later (probably sooner), they will be the victims of violent crime. The only question is whether they’ll be able to kill their attackers before they’re killed first.
When the marketing isn’t talking about home invasions and street assaults, it focuses on what former gun industry insider Ryan Busse calls “fear-based tactical culture,” in which gun owners are encouraged to imagine themselves as paramilitary operatives facing down urban rioters. Gun owners are now significantly more likely to cite protection from crime as the reason they own guns than they were 20 years ago.
When you buy this product, you are initiated into an entire culture full of magazines, TV shows and political activism. And there are other things you can purchase, including clothes, accessories and, of course, more guns. That culture is saturated with stories of the heroic gun owner who fends off the monstrous threats of the outside world with deadly force.
That will inevitably lead you, as a gun owner, to fantasize about using your guns in just this way. You will be primed and prepared. You will become like police officers who are trained to be terrified of the public and say the magic words “I feared for my life” when they kill civilians. You will be ready.
This is all reinforced by the conservative media’s obsession with urban crime. Is that largely about race? Of course it is. When White people in rural and suburban areas are told endlessly that they need guns to fend off urban “gangs” and undocumented immigrants, race isn’t subtext; it’s right there for all to see.
The answer to all this fear, say those who create and sustain it, is to flood the country with more and more guns. In so doing, the industry and its supporters have brought about the terrifying world of their imaginings. Except in this world, “law-abiding” gun owners are often standing alongside the criminals and the mass shooters, murdering the innocent and creating a nightmare of fear and grief.
Their guns will not deliver us from that nightmare. They only keep us trapped in it.