People For President Svante Myrick discusses public safety and emphasizes that more guns do not keep people and communities safer.
A teenage boy rings the wrong doorbell and is shot in the face. A 20-year-old woman is fatally shot when she and her friends pull into the wrong driveway. Two cheerleaders are shot when one accidentally gets into the wrong car. And a 6-year-old is shot when kids chase a basketball into a neighbor’s yard.
These tragic events seem incomprehensible. But we got a glimpse of an underlying reason for at least one of them, the wrong-doorbell shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl. According to his grandson, the 84-year-old shooter watched a steady diet of Fox News and OAN. He was immersed in a “24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”
Sadly, far-right politicians and media figures have habitually stoked fear and manufactured moral panics as a political strategy to amp up their base. And it’s having an effect: For decades, Gallup polls have consistently found that Americans believe crime is going up, whether it is or not.