The homeowner said he thought the boy was a burglar and ordered him to “freeze” Hattori perhaps didn’t understand “freeze” or misheard the man as saying “please.” In any case, the boy moved, and the man shot him with a. In the 1990s when I was Tokyo bureau chief of The Times, Japanese people regularly spoke to me about a 1992 incident in which a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student, Yoshihiro Hattori, was shot dead in Louisiana after knocking on the wrong door. in America, they send them to their graves.įoreigners admire our popular culture, our technology, our lifestyle, but are bewildered by our refusal to rein in guns. One of the girls, age 18, was hit in the back and a leg and taken by helicopter to a hospital she was initially reported to be in critical condition.Įlsewhere, brutes send their victims to the E.R. In Texas, two cheerleaders were shot after one of them mistakenly got into the wrong car in a parking lot.

As their car was turning around to leave, the homeowner allegedly fired his gun and struck her. In upstate New York, a 20-year-old woman was killed when she and several friends drove to the wrong address. The 84-year-old white man who, according to the prosecutor, shot him through a glass front door has been charged with first-degree assault the man said he thought the boy was breaking into his home.

In Kansas City, Mo., a Black 16-year-old was shot twice, in the forehead and an arm, when he went to the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers he is recovering from a traumatic brain injury. We’re caught in a spiral in which perceptions of rising crime lead more people to purchase firearms - about 60 million guns have been sold in the United States just since 2020 - and this in turn leads to more gun violence, which leads to more fear and gun purchases …. In most of the world, going to the wrong house is not a deadly risk.īut in the United States it is, because we’re awash in an estimated 450 million guns and suffer from a mass delusion that a gun in the home makes us safer.

Death by Nicholas Searcy