The Gun Lobby’s Fearmongering Enabled the Shootings of Kaylin Gillis & Ralph Yarl
Gillis was shot and killed for pulling into the wrong driveway in New York. Yarl was shot in the head after ringing the doorbell of the wrong house in Missouri.
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The past week has been marked by yet more uniquely American shooting tragedies: On Thursday, Ralph Yarl, a Black teen in Missouri, was shot in the head by an 84-year-old white man after Yarl mistook his house for a different one and rang the doorbell. Then, over the weekend, Kaylin A. Gillis, 20, was shot and killed in a rural area of New York after she pulled into the wrong driveway, prompting the 65-year-old homeowner to shoot her. Yarl survived the shooting and was recently released from the hospital; Gillis was pronounced dead at the scene.
The incidents can’t be taken in isolation of each other: They speak not only to the dangers of widely accessible firearms, but to the culture of paranoia and fearmongering that the gun lobby has pushed for decades. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted in a Monday TikTok, home intrusion—particularly by “urban youth,” aka a Black teen like Yarl—is “exactly the scenario” the gun lobby has taught “white homeowners,” especially older ones, that they need firearms to prepare for.
“This scenario of a young Black person coming to your home, probably a criminal, whom you can then shoot, is exactly what so many mouthpieces for the gun industry have been selling for decades,” Bouie said. “It’s part of the pitch: that you own one of these weapons…to defend your homestead, and from the image of urban crime, of urban disorder—of, essentially, Black people.”
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