The Fear Factory
How Manufactured Fear Fuels Our Nation’s Gun Violence Crisis
By: Caroline Light
For Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old resident of Kansas City, Missouri, the 32-caliber revolver he kept by his bedside was the one thing preventing his freefall into chaos, an essential tool of self-defense in an increasingly dangerous world. When he glimpsed the youthful brown face of 17-year-old Ralph Yarl on the other side of his storm door, he did not hesitate to pull the trigger, striking Yarl in the head. And as Yarl fell to the ground, Lester shot him again to make certain he had neutralized the threat.
As he scrambled away from Lester’s home, Yarl heard the words, “Don’t come around here.” Miraculously, Yarl will survive his injuries, which included a cracked skull and scarred brain tissue. It is not likely, however, that he will ever recover emotionally from this close encounter with our nation’s uniquely white supremacist brand of “Armed Citizenship.”
When questioned by police, Lester claimed he was “scared to death” when he saw the unarmed teen at his front door. Indeed, a “reasonable” profession of fear is necessary to the justifiable use of force in Missouri, but Lester was charged with first degree assault and armed criminal action, both of which are felonies. He is currently out on bail, and it is likely his defense will assert his right to “stand his ground” against a perceived threat to his safety.
According to Lester’s grandson, Klint Ludwig, Lester “watched Fox News all day every day, [which] reinforces this negative view of minority groups.” Ludwig surmised that the network’s “conspiracies and weird random racist things” influenced his grandfather’s paranoiac worldview that non-white people and immigrants are existential threats to his safety specifically, and more generally to an authentic “American” way of life.
Fox News though is only one tentacle of a stubbornly resilient hydra of apocalyptic misinformation that feeds our nation’s intensifying gun violence problem.
As Andrew Lester’s claimed “self-defensive” actions demonstrate, an increasingly extremist “gun rights” lobby participates actively in the mass-production of suspicion and insecurity, broadcasting a vision of the nation as colonized by “violent crime,” perpetrated by a litany of terrifying “bad guys” and “criminal thugs,” hellbent on destroying the security of white Christian Americans. Extremist politicians, like Arizona’s Kari Lake, broadcast hyper-partisan threats of armed retaliation against those upholding the rule of law. In this stark narrative of good and evil, of bad guys and good guys, guns are presented as the only antidote.
Given this toxic communion of paranoia and partisan hatred, it’s easy to forget that our national obsession with armed self-defense is a relatively recent phenomenon.
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of survey data, in 1999, 49% of gun owners said they owned a gun primarily for hunting, while only 26% cited self-defense as their primary reason. Compare this to Gallup poll data from 2021, in which 88% of gun owners cited protection as their main reason for owning a firearm.
This drastic shift over two decades speaks to a deliberate and highly effective strategy by the “gun rights” consortium — an increasingly extremist engine of firearm production and deregulation — to codify American dependence on firearms as urgently-needed devices of protection in a violent world.
The steady diet of fear-based marketing helped generate record-breaking gun sales during the spring of 2020. Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic — alongside intense economic, social, and political turbulence — Americans flocked to gun stores.
The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) recorded 33% more background checks than in 2019 as Americans purchased an estimated 19million guns in the first half of 2020. While the majority of gun purchases during the 2020 “gun surge” were made by people who already owned guns, public health scholars discovered a significant portion of first-time buyers, many who did not fit the typical profile of the American gun-owner.
Analyzing survey data, researchers Deborah Azrael and Matt Miller found that approximately 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million) became first-time gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021. Especially during times of national turmoil, the seductive, fear-based narrative framing guns as essential tools of self-defense reigns supreme, in spite of a growing archive of evidence to the contrary.
Thanks to the painstaking work of researchers, including public health experts, criminologists, and policy experts, we know that wherever there are more guns there are more gun deaths and injuries, more lethal road rage incidents, and more suicides and domestic altercations that turn deadly.
We know that whenever we deregulate firearms — by eliminating live-fire training requirements or background checks, by lowering the bar for firearm consumption — we witness spikes in violent crime and gun-related death and injury. We have an overflowing archive of data showing, unequivocally, a correlation of firearm deregulation with surges in crime, death, and injury. Despite this expanding trove of evidence, the concrete proof of firearms’ deadly effect on American lives, we fail time and time again to pass meaningful, life-saving policies.
Recent polls show that a significant majority of Americans support common sense firearm regulation.
We have demanded prohibitions on the ownership and use of weapons made for war. We have clamored for safety measures like Emergency Risk Protection Orders to remove guns from people who are likely to perpetrate violence. We have demanded Universal Background Checks to ensure that all firearm purchases are traceable, and to help keep guns out of the hands of people who may harm themselves or others.
Commonsense, life-saving gun regulations even enjoy strong support among gun-owners. 97Percent, a bipartisan group that conducts research on gun safety policies, found broad support among gun owners for regulations that limit gun access for people at high risk of violence. According to a recent poll of gun-owners, 78% of respondents supported laws prohibiting gun possession by people convicted of a domestic violence.
Together, gun-owners and non-gun-owners alike have demanded action in the wake of each senseless tragedy, but the pathway to even minimal mitigation seems elusive. We remain impossibly stymied by political inertia, which it appears is one of the main goals of “gun rights” extremism.
Take for example, the spring 2023 passage of Permitless Carry in Florida. A poll of Florida voters revealed that two-thirds opposed the removal of barriers to civilian concealed carry, but Governor DeSantis signed the bill into law behind closed doors. The fact that Florida legislators and the governor supported this legislation in spite of resistance from voting citizens and a mountain of evidence showing that gun regulations save lives suggests that ours is less a problem of empirical evidence than of democracy itself.
How is it possible that so many citizens can clamor for an end to the carnage via common sense, evidence-based firearm regulation and yet fail to institute concrete change?
Part of the answer rests at the heart of our prevailing “gun rights” narrative, the normalization of the belief that firearms are necessary for everyone’s protection.
The Firehose of Falsehood ultimately draws from a pernicious feedback loop of fear and helplessness. When we are panic-stricken by the endless cascade of gun violence in our schools, places of worship, sites of entertainment and recreation; when we are told that we cannot trust our community structures or system of governance and that we should fear anyone who does not look like us; when anxiety and panic supplant critical thinking and consideration, we are less likely to embrace nuance or to contemplate our growing archive of evidence. We are more likely to rush to gun stores and to invest in self-securitization and — perhaps most alarmingly — to tolerate fascist governance.
Perhaps it is not that we as a nation fail to believe the growing archive of evidence showing a clear pathway to a safer, more equitable nation. Instead, we face our democracy’s failure to empower the elected officials who represent the needs and wishes of a population growing wise to the threadbare lies we’re fed by the purveyors of “Armed Citizenship.”
Unless we can find a way to counteract the fear-based Firehose of Falsehood that continues to inform much of our firearm policy, the daily carnage will continue, as will the erosion of our norms of liberal democracy. If we don’t act soon, we will continue on our way to becoming a fractured nation, immobilized by fear.
Caroline Light is Director of Undergraduate Studies, Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University
Image of man with remote control by Sam Williams from Pixabay; American flag image by Tayeb MEZAHDIA from Pixabay