In most of the world, going to the wrong house is not a deadly risk.
But in the United States it is, because we are inundated with an estimated 450 million guns and suffer from the mass delusion that having a gun in the home makes us safer.
We are caught in a spiral where perceptions of rising crime lead to more people buying firearms – about 60 million guns have been sold in the United States as of 2020 – and this in turn leads to more gun violence, leading to more fear and gun purchases …. You get the idea.
So we have recent tragedies:
– In Kansas City, Mo., a black 16-year-old was shot twice, in the forehead and an arm, when he went to the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers; he is recovering from a traumatic brain injury. The 84-year-old white man who, according to prosecutors, shot him through a glass front door has been charged with first-degree assault; the man said he thought the boy was breaking into his house.
– In New York State, a 20-year-old woman was killed when she and some friends drove to the wrong address. As their car spun to leave, the homeowner allegedly fired his gun and hit her.
— In Texas, two cheerleaders were shot after one of them accidentally got into the wrong car in a parking lot. One of the girls, aged 18, was hit in the back and a leg and taken to a hospital by helicopter; she was initially reported to be in critical condition.
Elsewhere, brutes send their victims to the ER; in America they send them to their graves.
Foreigners admire our popular culture, our technology, our lifestyle, but are baffled by our refusal to rein in guns.
In the 1990s, when I was the bureau chief of The Times in Tokyo, Japanese people regularly spoke to me about an incident in 1992 in which a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student, Yoshihiro Hattori, was shot dead in Louisiana after knocking on the wrong door. The homeowner said he thought the boy was a burglar and ordered him to be “freezed”; Hattori may not have understood “freeze” or may have misunderstood the man when he said “please.” Anyway, the boy moved and the man shot him with a .44 magnum.
In Japan, where fewer people are killed with guns in a normal year than sometimes in a single mass shooting in America, the government later produced a booklet for Japanese travelers to the United States with helpful English travel phrases like “freeze” and “hands in the air.”
“We are more civilized,” a Japanese professor told The Times after the incident, and she was right.
We are not going to ban guns or eliminate gun-related deaths in America. But I argued in a longer essay that prudent gun control can plausibly reduce gun deaths by a third or more.
We may introduce universal background checks, safe storage requirements, a minimum age of 21 for private gun sales, and an enforced ban on gun ownership by those with a history of stalking or violent offenses. All states should adopt California’s successful experiment with background checks before purchasing ammunition; After introducing some smart gun control measures, California now has a gun fatality rate 38 percent below the national average.
As I write this I happen to be in Mississippi where there is a much stricter process for adopting a dog than buying a gun. Should it really be easier to buy an AR-15 style rifle than it is to adopt a chihuahua?
Above all, we must dispel the misconception that a gun in the home makes people safer. Yes, in rare cases, a weapon can avert a crime. But researchers have repeatedly found that having a gun in the home makes people more likely to be killed, not less. “People who live in homes with firearms are at greater risk of homicide death,” according to a 2022 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
People may choose to have firearms for hunting or target practice or to protect livestock from predators (I live on a ranch with guns), but given the increased risk, personal safety is not a good reason to purchase a gun.
We can encourage homeowners who feel unsafe to get bear spray instead of a gun. As a backpacker, I carry bear spray in grizzly land because it’s more effective than a gun at stopping one of these bears when it attacks; the same can be true of stopping a home intruder, and the consequences of a mistake are by no means fatal.
Because of our complacency, the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States is now gun violence, dwarfing car accidents. In 2020, more than 4,300 young people died from firearms in America; in the Netherlands there were two in 2019. At this rate, it will take a few millennia before the Netherlands loses as many children to guns as we do each year.
We accept the inconveniences of driving vehicles – seat belts, child seats, no-one in the back of pickups – because they can help us save lives. For the same reason, why are we not equally willing to accept secure storage or universal background checks for ammunition?
I think of these young people who were shot simply because they went to the wrong place, and I think if only we loved our children as much as we loved our guns.