I saw the report on the news. Thought, “I’ve done that. We’ve all done that.” Pulled into the wrong driveway. Or maybe used a driveway to turn around. Many of us have been guilty of ringing the wrong door bell, as Ralph Yarl was. Guilty of an innocent mistake. A simple error. Ralph Yarl is 16. Will survive. But only because he scrambled away to another house. The homeowner, according to The New York Times, an 84-year-old white man. Gun owner. Terrified by the current hysteria over rising crime. He’s been charged. Faces prison. But at 84 likely won’t serve time.
The shooter in upstate New York. The man who killed 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, a passenger in the car that mistakenly pulled into his driveway, was also charged. Second-degree murder. He was “sour,” neighbors say. As if that matters. As if this was about his personality. As if it explains anything.
Gillis’ murder and the attempted murder of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl are symptoms of broader, intersecting ailments. Diseases of the American psyche that have deep roots in our mythology, in our history, but that have been grown dramatically in the Age of Trump.
We have long romanticized guns. Invested them with shamanistic powers. Fetishized them. The National Rifle Association has spent the last several decades on a crusade to build on the mythology of self-defense and self-reliance as it seeks to prop up gun manufacturers and preserve an individual right to objects of mass murder.
The NRA stokes fear as it does this. Of crime. Of invasion. As one voice in a chorus of right-wing, often fascistic elements, who speak to mostly white men — mostly, not exclusively by any means — of threats. They stoke fear. Anger. Resentment. Call us to a mythic past. Tell us this is a war.
This was Donald Trump’s M.O. It is now Ron DeSantis’. Jim Jordan’s. Lauren Boebert’s. Tucker Carlson’s. Fox News’. The conservative media’s.
It is the M.O. of the fascist. Of political operatives who enlist myth, and fear, who scapegoat and target and speak in apocalyptic language.
Trump, in his inaugural, used the phrase “American carnage.” Has called on his “Second Amendment people” to defend the nation. To defend him.
He has help from publications like The New York Post, which publishes screeds against liberals (“George Soros-funded district attorneys,” a claim that has been debunked more times than I can count) under a “News” chyron.
And from moronic pundits like Tucker Carlson, an opponent of gun control unless it keeps the people he mocks from owning firearms.
Lauren Boebert, elected member of the House of Representatives. Says Americans need to own more guns. Says Democrats are “grooming” kids to be LGBT+ (whatever that means). Sends out Christmas cards showing her kids with rifles and scopes.
The imagery on Boebert’s card and that of Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, writes Zeeshan Aleem, “were bold political and cultural statements.”
The style of the guns, their size, the number of them and the fact that they were being held by young children displayed a disturbing vision of family and safety — one that speaks to a zeal for guns that exploits the right to bear arms as part of a right-wing culture of everyday militance. That culture, which is racialized in nature, in turn makes our society less safe — and helps create fertile soil for extremist violence.
Aleem makes an important point. Places this gun fetish in the larger context. Makes clear that “the power of these images lies not just in the guns but who can wield them with cultural impunity, and toward what end.” The images help “normalize a spectacle of vigilantism that weaves the possibility of warfare into everyday American life.”
And doing so, I would add, meets the definition of fascism. Kaylin Gillis’ murder. The shooting of Ralph Yarl. These are not random, isolated incidents. They are not unexplainable. They are part of our gun fetish. They grow from a soil of White Supremacy and fear. The belief fostered by right wing politicians that everyone is out to get us. That there are real Americans and others. That we have the right to defend our homes, ourselves with extreme violence, that asking questions is dangerous. Waiting is dangerous. We’ve learned — from the right, but also from television’s love affair with firearms — that America is a charnel house. That danger lurks around every corner. That there are people seeking to steal our nation from under our feet.
Guns have become not just a tool of destruction, but a symbol of a warped kind of liberty. A symbol that puts all of us in danger. Mass shootings capture our attention, but it is the preponderance of firearms and their linkage to fear and race that underpins the lie that firearms make us safer. The lie we tell ourselves. A like that spreads and leaves a growing body count in its wake.