Front door shootings: are Americans scared of their neighbors?

A series of front-door shootings has shown how stand-your-ground laws and principles can be dramatic in the US. According to the Associated Press (AP), in the early 1970s, surveys showed that about half of America believed most people were trustworthy. By 2020, that number had fallen to less than one-third.

The news agency claims that the distrust, mixed with easy access to weapons, poor firearms training, sometimes outright racism, and legal confusion, has produced a string of shootings.

"Stand-your-ground" laws, AP explains, are often the base for the defense of the shooters involved in this type of incident. Those types of laws widen the right to self-defense when someone is threatened.

Despite their intent, data collected by the news agency from a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open shows that states with "stand-your-ground" laws actually see monthly homicide rates increase between 8% and 11%.

One of those states is Michigan, where one of the first high-profile front-door shootings happened in 2018. Brennan Walker a Black 14-year-old knocked on a door in Detroit, looking for directions to school. He tried to explain he was lost to the white woman behind the door when he saw a man grab a gun.

Walker managed to run away, but the woman called 911, saying her husband was chasing a "black man who tried to break in." When the police arrived and learned what happened, they arrested her husband, Jeffrey Zeigler, 53.

Five years later, seven people were shot in four events in just the span of six days, between the 20 and 25 of April, 2023, for common mistakes that landed them in the wrong place.

Two of those shootings happened after victims committed the mistake of simply arriving at the wrong address. One occurred in Kansas City, Missouri, and the second in upstate New York, with a fatal victim.

Black teenager Ralph Yarl was supposed to pick up his younger twin brothers but accidentally entered the wrong street and knocked on the wrong door. According to NBC news, white 84-year-old Andrew Lester chased and shot him at that moment. Yarl, 16, survived the assault.

Kaylin Gillis, a victim of a similar shooting in the rural town of Hebron, upstate New York, did not have that luck. According to the AP, the fatal victim was looking for a friend's house and mistakenly went to the wrong address, only to be met with gunfire from the driveway.

On the same day, cheerleader Heather Roth opened the door to a car she thought was hers, only to find a man sitting in the passenger seat. She ran back to her friend's car and rolled down the window to apologize for the confusion.

When Roth was about to apologize, the man opened fire, wounding her and severely injuring her friend Payton Washington. According to Abc News, Washington, who was shot in the leg and back, was rushed into the intensive care unit.

A six-year-old girl named Kinsley was shot while she was biking outside her house when her neighbor had a small fight with some kids and their father about them retrieving a basketball from his yard in Gaston County, North Carolina. Robert Louis Singletary, 24, was arrested in Florida.

Kinsley's whole family was hurt, according to a report by CNN. The girl described the incident to WBTV. "I couldn't get inside in time, so he shot my daddy in the back," she said in declarations collected by CNN. Her mother explained that a bullet touched the kid's cheek, and another hurt her elbow.

The following weekend, in Florida, two Instacart delivery workers were shot by a house owner when they mistakenly drove onto his property after they got lost. According to NPR, the resident said he fired after the car ran over his foot, but the workers claim they just reversed when they saw the gun.

According to the AP, front-door shootings appear to make up a tiny percentage of the more than 15,000 people killed yearly in the US in firearm homicides. However, there are few statistics on these shootings, so it isn't easy to know with precision.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder data collected by CNN, firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths in 2021. It is the leading cause of death in that age tier in the US.