A new wave of shooters make skeptical claims of fear
A GoFundMe page started to raise money for medical bills and other expenses for Ralph Yarl, who was shot dead when he rang a doorbell in Kansas City, Missouri. Credit: GoFundMe screenshot
It's been said that humanity's strongest and oldest emotion is fear. There is plenty of evidence for that.
Fear kept us alive in our earliest days. Fear of animals — or enemies — that could harm us helped keep us safe. Fear of the night that hid those foes, fear of the weather we could not control, fear of the truly unknown — all led us to take wise precautions.
Even the language of fear is strong. Fear smells: the whiff of fear. It moves: Fear engulfs like a blanket. It makes us tremble: Put the fear of God in him. It is paralyzing: Fear, wrote "Dune" author Frank Herbert, is a mind-killer.
Fear is a potent motivator — and recently, a frequently cited excuse by people turning on their fellow humans.
Earlier this month, Mitarius Boyd, 21, a Walgreens employee in Nashville, Tennessee, shot a 24-year-old pregnant woman he suspected of stealing cosmetics. Boyd told police he fired his semiautomatic in the store's parking lot because "he was in fear" not knowing whether the woman or her female companion was armed.
The next day, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot by 84-year-old Andrew Lester in Kansas City, Missouri, when Yarl rang Lester's doorbell by mistake after his mother sent him to pick up his two siblings at a friend's house. But Yarl mixed up the addresses and Lester shot him through the glass door, telling police "he was 'scared to death' due to the man's size."
Two days later, an upstate Hebron, New York man shot into a car that mistakenly drove up his driveway and was turning around. One bullet killed Kaylin Gillis, 20, who never got out of the car. “There was no threat,” the local sheriff said. "They were leaving.”
This week, Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola, who successfully smashed through a window at the U.S. Capitol allowing some of the first Jan. 6 rioters to breach the building, took the stand in his own trial and denied he tore a riot shield from a Capitol Police officer, saying he took it from a fellow rioter because he had seen another man injured by police rubber bullets. "I was in fear," Pezzola said. "I thought any moment I could get hit with one of those."
Bloodshed motivated by invocations of fear is a grotesque twist on FDR's admonition that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Fear is at the root of the "stand your ground" laws being cited in the Yarl and Gillis cases. Reasonably fearing for your life is justification for shooting someone threatening you. But what is reasonable?
Lester said he feared Yarl's size. Yarl is 5-foot-8 and 140 pounds. But Yarl also is Black, and Lester is white, and there is a troubling history of white people overestimating the size of Black males, and turning those misconceptions into misperceptions of dangerousness. Given Yarl's actual size, the reported sunny disposition of the saxophone-playing honors student, and the nature of his errand, it seems race could be entwined in this case. But not in all cases.
Political rhetoric could play a role. Elected leaders and gun advocates hammering a message that crime is rampant and "they" are coming for you and you must protect yourself, amped further by social media paranoia, create the trigger-twitchy condition Sophocles described thousands of years ago: "To him who is in fear everything rustles."
Skepticism of some excuses is warranted. How much is fear and how much anger? How much is reasonable and how much irrational? How much is spontaneous and how much fermented? How much is defense and how much provocation? How much is real and how much rationalization?
Traditionally, we associate fear with the hunted, not the hunter. What a scary place to be with fear being claimed at both ends of a gun.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
