A handyman in North Carolina had arrived to repair the damage caused by a leak. A teenager in Georgia was looking for his girlfriend’s apartment. A cheerleader in Texas wanted to find her car in a dark parking lot.
Each of them accidentally came to the wrong address or opened the wrong door—and each was shot. His innocent mistakes are examples of the mistakes that can happen in the United States, a country rife with guns, anger and paranoia, and where most states have empowered gun owners with new self-defense laws.
The issue of “wrong direction” shootings recently sparked widespread outrage and protests after a homeowner in Kansas City, Missouri, shot Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old black youth who rang the wrong doorbell. Days later, a 20-year-old woman in New York State was fatally shot after she and her friends pulled into the wrong driveway. And then two cheerleaders in Texas were shot and killed after one got into the wrong car in a dark parking lot.
But many other cases have attracted much less attention. Although shootings like this are relatively rare among the country’s nearly 49,000 gun deaths each year, gun control advocates say they vividly illustrate how quickly the United States turns to guns.
Gun purchases spiked during the pandemic and racial justice riots and protests after George Floyd was killed while in police custody in Minnesota in May 2020. Nearly 20 percent of American households bought a gun between March 2020 and March 2022, and about 5 percent of Americans bought a gun for the first time, a NORC poll at the University of Chicago found.
At the same time, some red states passed new laws allowing people to carry open or concealed weapons without a permit. More than 30 states also have “stand your ground” laws. Some have made it more difficult to prosecute homeowners claiming self-defense in a shooting.
Several studies have suggested that such laws have few benefits, increase the likelihood of gun violence, and may discriminate against minority groups.
One night in March 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, 19-year-old Omarian Banks was dropped off at his girlfriend’s apartment complex, where all the buildings look almost identical. He accidentally walked up to the wrong door and knocked.
Banks tried to apologize for his mistake, but according to police and Banks’ girlfriend, the occupant inside the apartment, Darryl I. Bynes, told Banks: “No, you’re in the right house” and fatally shot him. . Bynes, 32, will stand trial for murder this summer.
Banks’s parents have been reliving their trauma after seeing the news about Ralph Yarl.
“I know that people have the right to protect their homes. But take a minute. Because that’s someone else’s son or daughter that you’re going to kill,” said Lisa Johnson-Banks, his mother.
By: This article was written by Jack Healy, Glenn Thrush, Eliza Fawcett and Susan C. Beachy.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6681305, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-26 19:10:06
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