Why You Can Get Shot in America for…Knocking on the Wrong Door

Meet America’s Newest Institution of Social Collapse: the Doorstep Shooting.

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First, the 16 year old boy who was shot for…knocking on the wrong door. He was shot by an elderly man twice, including once in the head. Then, the young woman. Shot for…driving into the wrong driveway with her friends. A man took out a gun and opened fire, killing her. Then, finally, perhaps the most disturbing one of all. Cheerleaders. Who opened the door to a car that they thought was theirs. Realizing their mistake, they went to their car. The owner of the first car followed them. They rolled down their window to apologize — and…

The man came up to them. Roth rolled the window down to apologize and explain her mistake. The man pulled a gun and fired into the car, striking both girls, Roth told KTRK. Roth had a graze wound that was treated on scene. Washington was shot in the back and a leg.

“Payton opens the door and she starts throwing up blood,” Roth told KTRK.

First responders flew Washington to hospital. Her spleen was removed and she is scheduled for more surgeries to repair damage to multiple organs, a coach said on Instagram late on Tuesday.

What on earth is going on here? Who in their right mind is…threatened…by…cheerleaders? Teenagers? Teenage girls? What possible explanation can someone have for following teenage girls for making the simple mistake of opening the wrong door…and shooting them point blank?

There’s been a lot of discussion about these events. I wanted to take some time to gather my thoughts. Three? That’s a trend, not an anomaly. Three in a row. What’s happening here goes like this.

America’s seeing the rise of a new institution. An institution of social collapse. There are good institutions — marriage, European hugs and kisses on the street, the way French chairs at bistros face the street, so that you watch people…peacefully. And then there are bad ones. Implosive ones. Ugly ones. Ones that arise in the context of social collapse. Institutions in this sense means: everyday events that we begin to take for granted. You don’t question — most don’t — the way chairs at a French bistro face the street. It just is. That’s an institution. This is one, too, but of a diametrically opposed kind.

America’s pioneered many gruesome and strange institutions of social collapse. The mass shooting. The school shooting. “Medical bankruptcy,” which doesn’t exist in most other countries. Medical debt, student debt, lunch debt. People never retiring, never taking vacations, the way people have stopped saying hello to one another on the street, distrustful, resentful, fearful. These things don’t exist much outside America — certainly not at mass, daunting, crippling social scales. And all these institutions haven’t just accelerated during American collapse, as America’s fallen apart, socially, economically, culturally, politically — and we’ll come back to that — they are the everyday experience of living in a collapsing society.

This appears to be the rise of a whole new institution of social collapse. The doorstep shooting. Now, in America, you can get killed…just for knocking on the wrong door.

It’s going to be hard for me to explain just how completely bizarre and disturbing that is, because by now, sadly, Americans are steeped in the institutions of collapse. Collapse is a slow burn. We adapt. That’s not always a good thing, learning to tune it all out, shrug and get on with your day, normalize horror, terror, chaos, dysfunction. It gets you by, but it has a price, which is that you grow numb. To the bitter reality of collapse.

There’s nowhere else in the world that this new institution is now rising. Nowhere. I can’t think of a single other country, no matter how broken or ravaged, where people get killed just for knocking on the wrong door. Sure, there are violent nations, broken, unable to really police brutality. There, gangs and mobs and mafias rule. The men who shot these poor innocents — like the cheerleaders — weren’t any those things. Not hitmen, and this wasn’t a war over turf, power, drugs, property, or human chattel, as is so often the case in countries where brutality rules. They were just…random men. So this is a very different thing. It feels off, in a whole new way. And that is because it really is both of those things.

You are now witnessing the rise of a new institution of collapse. Think of how many Americans have had to adapt to. First, mass shootings, which became normalized, beginning in the 80s or so. Then school shootings began to happen, around the 90s — and grew to the point where they occur regularly today. Along the way, all these other institutions got normalized too — Americans had to just learn to live with healthcare that’d put them in lifelong debt, or education that would, never retiring, and so forth. This is a new one.

The doorstep shooting.

So. Why is this happening? Two explanations have been offered so far, and it’s not that they’re wrong…it’s just that there’s more to the story. The first, of course, is guns. I’m not saying guns aren’t a problem. They are. A very big one. And yet there are plenty of nations in which guns abound, like, say, I don’t know, Pakistan, or Colombia, or Mozambique, or Uruguay. Each of those nations has millions of guns. But if I knock on the wrong door there, I won’t get shot to death. I’ll probably just be offered…a cup of tea. Even gentle Canada has plenty of guns — one for every three Canadians. Did you know that? Knock on the wrong door in Canada? You’ll probably make a friend. Nobody’s shooting schoolgirls and teen boys in any of those places, despite, yes, their many problems. Only in America.

Let me emphasize that I’m not arguing against gun control. I’m saying that the story of why America is developing institution after institution of social collapse — right down to this new one, the doorstep shooting — goes deeper. It’s about guns, but it’s also about a society, and how it goes wrong. Wrong enough, that violence just begins to erupt…in parking lots…in once-peaceful neighborhoods…on doorsteps.