Opinion: Within the past few weeks, multiple people have been shot over minor mistakes that should never have escalated to the use of a gun. It begs the question of how the presence of guns and the idea of safety have become so intertwined.
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On April 13, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot after mixing up the address where he was supposed to be picking up his younger twin brothers from a friend’s house. He rang the doorbell and was met by a man who shot him in the head. He fell to the ground before being shot again and running to neighboring houses for help. 

On April 15, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed after she and three others, including her boyfriend, turned down the wrong driveway. She had no cell signal to look at her maps and believed they had the right address. They turned to leave when she was fatally shot by a man standing on his front porch.

On April 17, two teenage girls, Heather Roth and Payton Washington, were shot after Roth mistakenly opened the door to a car she thought was her friend’s in a grocery store parking lot. She apologized and walked to her friend’s car. They were sitting in their car when the man whose car door Roth opened walked over and shot into the car.

That same night, a 6-year-old and her parents were shot after their basketball rolled into their neighbor’s yard. She went to retrieve the ball when she was shouted at by her neighbor. Her father walked over to confront his neighbor. Their neighbor went back inside his house before returning and opening fire. The girl was shot in the cheek, her mother in the elbow and her father in the back. Her father tried to draw the gunfire away from his family.

I’ve become numb to opening my phone in the morning and reading about another shooting in this country. It’s an occurrence that has almost become routine; it’s discussed in the 24-hour news cycle before it begins to blur into all the shootings before it.

But these shootings are different, and I can’t shake the lingering feeling of fear that I’ve been left with since they happened.

Just as I’ve become numb to reading about the mass shootings, I’ve also internalized the possibility of having to experience one. I’ve become aware of the potential target that a large gathering or crowd poses, the target of a school, the target of going to a concert or even the movies. Public spaces as a whole have become a target.

The thing is, these people weren’t shot in public spaces. They were shot in neighborhoods and their cars. Places where most people are able to enjoy privacy and security without any hesitation or question that these luxuries won’t be there one day.

The constant and ever-growing rate of shootings in this country has seeped into every aspect of our lives, and into our ability to ever feel safe again.

While I could spend an eternity discussing the lack of gun control, background checks or the myriad of laws that have allowed us to reach this point, I want to call into question the impact of guns on our perceptions of safety and fear.
Those who support the ownership of guns often cite stand-your-ground laws. Laws that allow individuals to protect themselves and their property. In short, they own a gun because it makes them feel safer.
However, according to a study in Nature, case studies have repeatedly shown that “gun ownership is associated with an increased risk of gun-related homicide or suicide occurring in the home.” Additionally, the gun-related homicides are largely driven by family members or known individuals, not strangers.
It’s also worth mentioning that even in public places with concealed carry, David Hemenway, professor of health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, stated that the presence of guns only makes crimes more violent. 

“What guns do is make hostile interactions — robberies, assaults — much more deadly,” Hemenway said on the Science Vs podcast.

Thus, while guns may give some the false illusion of safety, they objectively do not make us as a society any safer. Instead, they make people such as myself more scared.

At the end of the day, seven people were shot because they made mistakes. Mistakes that I can’t even begin to fathom the frequency of. Mistakes that never hurt anyone or anything. Mistakes that could have and should have been solved with a simple “I’m sorry” that let everyone walk away and forget about it.

The ownership and presence of guns made it so these people can’t walk away from these mistakes. Their lives will forever be changed, and so will the attitudes of everyone who is forcibly impacted by gun violence in this country.