Knocking on the Wrong House or Door Can Be Deadly In a Nation Armed With Guns - The New... - 0 views
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Each of them accidentally went to the wrong address or opened the wrong door — and each was shot. They had made innocent mistakes that became examples of the kind of deadly errors that can occur in a country bristling with guns, anger and paranoia, and where most states have empowered gun owners with new self-defense laws.
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The maintenance man in North Carolina had just arrived to fix damage from a leak. The teenager in Georgia was only looking for his girlfriend’s apartment. The cheerleader in Texas simply wanted to find her car in a dark parking lot after practice.
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many other cases have attracted far less attention. In July 2021, a Tennessee man was charged with brandishing a handgun and firing it after two cable-company workers mistakenly crossed onto his land. Last June, a Virginia man was arrested after the authorities say he shot at three lost teenage siblings who had accidentally pulled onto his property.
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Each one of these incidents resulted from unique events. But activists and researchers say they stem from a convergence of bigger factors — increased fear of crime and an attendant surge in gun ownership, increasingly extreme political messaging on firearms, fearmongering in the media and marketing campaigns by the gun industry that portray the suburban front door as a fortified barrier against a violent world.
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“The gun lobby markets firearms as something you need to defend yourself — hammers in search of nails,”
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The perception that crime, especially violent gun crime, has increased is not a manufactured myth. National murder rates have climbed by about a third since 2019, according to government data, even accounting for modest declines in fatal shootings over the past 18 months.
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Gun purchases rose during the pandemic and the unrest and racial-justice protests after the murder of George Floyd. Nearly 20 percent of American households bought a gun from March 2020 to March 2022, and about 5 percent of Americans bought a gun for the first time,
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More than 30 states also have “stand your ground” laws. Some have recently strengthened their “castle doctrine” laws, making it more difficult to prosecute homeowners who claim self-defense in a shooting.
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But several large-scale studies have suggested that the laws have few benefits, increase the likelihood of gun violence and might discriminate against minority groups, especially Black people.
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The effect of self-defense laws protecting homeowners and gun owners is fiercely debated, with proponents arguing that their mere presence deters criminal behavior or civil disorder
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shootings in which white people shot Black people were nearly three times as likely to be found “justified” compared with cases where white people shot other white people.
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A 2023 analysis of recent academic research by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation found no evidence that such laws had the deterrent effect that their sponsors claimed, and there was some indication, while not conclusive, that the laws might account for some increases in gun violence.
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weapons were actually more likely to be used in suicides, discharged accidentally, stolen or brandished in domestic disputes, than used to fend off an external attack.
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The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups have long disputed such assessments, citing surveys that show far greater use of weapons for legitimate self-defense.
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About a third of the roughly 16,700 gun owners surveyed in a study led by William English, a Georgetown University business school professor, said they had used their guns for self-defense, prompting Mr. English to estimate that as many as 1.6 million people in the country had defended themselves with a weapon that year.