A string of perplexing shootings across the United States has revealed an on-edge society where firing first and asking questions later – in other words, letting a gun do all the talking – has become, for some, acceptable if not always legal.

The incidents involve people, including children, who have been shot at for seemingly mundane acts and mistakes: ringing the wrong doorbell, pulling into the wrong driveway, chasing a ball into a neighbor’s yard.

There has long been a sense for travelers in unfamiliar areas that some driveways are better not breached – lest one meet a proverbial recluse holding a shotgun loaded with rock salt and nails.

Yet a barrage of state laws scrapping concealed carry permitting requirements, the replacement of a legal duty to retreat from danger with a “stand-your-ground” standard, and a steadily growing national arsenal of handguns and high-powered rifles have heightened the risk of violence. These trends have raised concerns about desensitizing society to the costs of firing a weapon too soon, and they represent changes to a core social contract about the role of guns in a democratic society.  

“What we are seeing is an abdication of responsibility to the public – we are not concerned about our fellow man,” says Kenneth Nunn, an expert on U.S. self-defense law and a law professor emeritus at the University of Florida. “I think there’s a belief that if you’re a homeowner and have a gun, you’re basically insulated from any criminal charges if you use it ... that there’s no limiting principle for vigilante violence. And some people are OK with that.”

To be sure, arrests have been made in most of the cases that have generated headlines in recent weeks. But at the same time, gray areas in the fast-shifting legal landscape can make it difficult to fully know and understand the civilian rules of deadly force, which differ in small but important ways from those applied to police officers.

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Gallup, "Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws: Analysis of FBI Supplementary Homicide Report Data" by John K. Roman

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“Everybody is on edge”

That situation is amplified by the fact that about two dozen states have gotten rid of permitting for concealed carry. Since such permits have a training component, the result is less training for gun owners. 

In addition, the Supreme Court ruled last year that authorities can’t arbitrarily deny Americans the right to carry a weapon. And although the right to bear arms is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, laws governing their use make up a state-by-state patchwork – and amount to a heap of contradictory regulations for a deadly tool.

This is all taking place against a backdrop of politically charged anxiety. Some 88% of gun owners say self-defense – not hunting or sport shooting – is the main reason for owning a weapon. That purchasing trend has been increasing.

“When I ask, why are you here [to get training], the response is usually, ‘I’m scared,’” says Georgia firearms trainer Rodney Smith. “Everybody is on edge. Somebody walks up and you think, ‘Oh, they’re coming out here to rob me.’ They’re overzealous in how they respond.”

Gun-buying spiked in the Obama era, saw a “Trump slump” in the late 2010s, and surged again during the pandemic. The U.S. now has about 400 million guns in circulation – more than one per resident.

Though the bulk of gun buyers have been those adding to their collections, the last two decades have also seen an expansion in the kinds of Americans who own guns. Data from Northeastern University and Harvard found that women as well as Black and Hispanic people made up significant shares of first-time gun buyers between 2019 and 2021.

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Attendees look at pistols at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, on April 15, 2023.

The longing for a sense of safety is natural, but studies have shown fairly conclusively that more guns and laxer gun laws have not reduced crime, and have sometimes increased violence. These latest shootings are examples of that dynamic, says Robert Spitzer, author of “The Gun Dilemma.”

“Very typically, these are cases of people who are amateurs and who don’t have much in the way of training and experience and they lack judgment, which are problems that are escalated when you put a gun in a person’s hand,” says Dr. Spitzer, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Cortland. “People say that an armed society is a polite society. That’s false. An armed society is a terrified society.”

Moving away from “duty to retreat”

Whereas two decades ago most Americans were under the legal “duty to retreat” from danger in public areas, 38 states have since shifted to the stand-your-ground standard, which makes no requirement that those who feel in danger must delay before responding to a threat with deadly force.

It is an expansion of the castle doctrine, which dates to English common law and holds that individuals have the right to use force to protect themselves in their own homes. 

These provisions are by no means absolute. You can’t instigate a confrontation and then claim you fired in self-defense.

But resolving such shootings can be tough calls. Self-defense claims are notably difficult to parse, in large part because there’s often only one side of the story left to tell after someone is killed – the shooter’s declaration that they feared for their life.

Still, juries have been fairly decisive in decoding stand-your-ground laws, even if prosecutors have been at times slow to press charges against shooters. In 2013, a Florida jury found a neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman not guilty of murder for following, confronting, and then killing a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin, after Trayvon fought back. Around the same time, Jordan Davis, the son of current Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, was killed after an argument with a white man about loud music. The man, Michael Dunn, was sentenced to life without parole. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Gun owners take a class in self-defense at the Worcester Pistol and Rifle Club in Boylston, Massachusetts, in 2019.

In 2019, another Florida jury found Michael Drejka guilty of killing Markeis McGlockton in another racially charged case that stemmed from an argument over a parking spot. And in early 2020, three white men followed a Black jogger named Ahmaud Arbery through a Brunswick, Georgia, suburb, killing him after Mr. Arbery tried to defend himself. The men claimed self-defense. A state jury found all three men guilty of murder.

This month in Texas, these issues have taken an interesting turn. Gov. Greg Abbott has injected the executive branch into the debate, vowing to grant clemency to an off-duty U.S. soldier whom a jury found guilty of murder for killing a social justice protester in 2020. The soldier had claimed he shot the protester, who was carrying a rifle, in self-defense.

Anything-goes culture

Such an interjection by the executive branch sends a powerful message to the public.

“I don’t have a problem with people using force and even deadly force to defend homes. The social problem ... with stand-your-ground is more endemic than the legal problem,” says Mr. Nunn, the self-defense law expert, who is Black. The problem is that “regardless of what the law says you have to do to claim stand-your-ground, the public and police and a fair number of prosecutors seem to believe that you don’t have to do those things that are necessary to claim self-defense. I think [such failures to act according to law] create a culture, and it’s a culture where people believe that as long as you are a white person using a gun, you can do whatever you want.”

A 2013 study that analyzed FBI data found that race plays a significant factor in so-called justifiable homicide rulings, and that this is even more pronounced in states with stand-your-ground laws.

In some ways, the recent headline-making shootings present an opportunity for states to step up training requirements, says Mr. Smith, the gun safety instructor.

While most gun owners are concerned about authorities prosecuting lawful gun owners who are defending themselves or innocent strangers, most also support that extensive training be required in permitting, polls indicate.

Ben Crump Law/AP

Ralph Yarl knocked on the wrong door and was shot by a homeowner in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 13, 2023.

“Ability, opportunity, and jeopardy have to come together before deadly force can be used,” says Mr. Smith, founder of the Georgia Firearms and Security Training Academy in Monroe. “That case in Kansas City, the guy was knocking on the door. Was there ability to hurt the homeowner? No. Was there an opportunity to hurt him? No. The door was there. Was the man’s life in jeopardy? Hell, no. All these things have to come together for deadly force to be authorized. You are responsible for every round you put downrange. And every round you put downrange has a lawyer’s name on it.”

To him, incidents like that illustrate the range of legal pitfalls and unintended consequences that can come into play. He recounts the 2022 case of a bodega clerk in New York who was charged with murder after stabbing to death an assailant. The murder charge was dropped amid an outcry.

Mr. Smith also cites a case of a “good guy with a gun” at an Indiana mall last year. An armed young man saw another man firing indiscriminately with a rifle in the food court. He drew his own weapon and killed the shooter. He was widely hailed as a lifesaving hero. But Mr. Smith also sees the risks involved with a young gun owner taking a 40-yard shot with a pistol in a crowded area. “I don’t know if I would’ve tried that shot,” says Mr. Smith.

Historically, guns have been strictly regulated in the U.S. “People in the 1700s and 1800s and early 1900s well understood that when more average people have guns and are carrying them around, you get more bad outcomes,” says Dr. Spitzer, the sociologist. “But that lesson seems to have been lost in the last couple of decades.”

Rajanish Kakade/AP/File

People crowd a market on the eve of of Dussehra festival in Mumbai, India, Oct. 4, 2022. India's population will outstrip China's by the end of this week, a United Nations report says.

It is the world’s most populous nation. An Asian power with ancient roots, a rapidly modernizing economy, nuclear weapons, and a large military budget, it is intent on claiming what it sees as its rightful, top-table place in world affairs.

And it is not China.

It is India, which this week officially overtakes its giant neighbor’s population with a total of over 1.425 billion people. That milestone comes a few months after India displaced Britain as the world’s fifth-largest economy. These are nicely timed fillips as Delhi prepares to host the G-20 summit this autumn.

Yet alongside huge promise, India faces huge challenges, at home and abroad.

And how its Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, navigates these challenges – as China and America root for quite different outcomes – will have implications beyond India. They could impact relations between Washington and Beijing, and the shape of 21st-century world politics.

Mr. Modi’s geopolitical challenge is delicate enough: staking out a role for a rising India between the superpower rivals. Yet setting a path to sustained economic growth – and narrowing a still-yawning gap with China and the United States – could prove even more daunting.

“India’s time has come,” Mr. Modi says. And, in some ways, he has good reason to feel upbeat.

The economy has been booming. It is unrecognizable from a few decades ago, when I traveled around India as a college student and lived in one of its hundreds of thousands of farming villages while researching a development economics project.

With education levels rising, poverty rates falling, a technology and services sector thriving, and billions of dollars pouring into long-overdue infrastructure, India’s economy is on course to grow at a world-leading clip of nearly 6% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Anupam Nath/AP

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a crowd in Guwahati, India, April 14, 2023. He has ambitious plans to boost India's geopolitical role, steering between China and the United States.

In another area critical to growth, Western investment, China’s loss may prove India’s gain. The combination of pandemic dislocations and U.S. restrictions on high-tech trade has dampened some companies’ enthusiasm for new projects in China.

Even companies likely to stay there are viewing India as a way to hedge that commitment. This month, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, opened the company’s first retail stores in India. While the long-term attraction is a huge potential consumer market, Apple is already shifting some iPhone production to India: a quarter of the handsets could be produced there within the next few years.

On the world stage, too, Mr. Modi has reason to feel bullish. Both China and America have been keen to make nice with India and play down areas of friction, as their own ties get ever chillier.

Still, to be able truly to declare “India’s time has come,” he will need to tackle a range of thorny economic, social, and political challenges.

The economic strides have been enormous. So, too, gains in education and infrastructure.

But many of the problems facing India when I lived and researched there in the 1970s persist.

Literacy levels have risen; in those days fewer than half of Indians could read. But the national figure still hovers around 80%, and it’s just 65% for girls. Rural schools especially are struggling from a shortage of qualified teachers and, often, a lack of running water and basic sanitation.

Hundreds of millions of Indians have been lifted out of poverty. But the rural poverty line is only 40 cents a day, and more than 200 million Indians still fall below it. India’s annual per capita GDP is around $2,000.

And while the population picture ought to be good news for its economy – disproportionately young and still growing – many of the millions who join the employment market each year are finding it hard, even impossible, to get a well-paying job.

Indeed, many seem to have stopped trying. Less than half of working-age Indians have a job or are looking for one, according to a 2021 World Bank report. Only about one-fifth of Indian women are working.

Niharika Kulkarni/Reuters

Mothers with their newborn babies wait for a checkup as other women wait for their turn to get antenatal examinations outside a doctor's room at a maternity hospital in Mumbai, India, April 25, 2023.

Mr. Modi’s hope seems to rest on attracting large-scale investment, encouraged by success in the south of India, where IT-support businesses, call centers, and other service industries have become world-leading partners for major Western companies.

The lure of India’s vast market may prove less enticing, at least in the short term. Even an expanding and increasingly prosperous middle class lacks the purchasing power to snap up the latest iPhones.

It is in Mr. Modi’s drive to remedy this situation that his economic strategy and his geopolitical balancing act may intersect.

India is not about to break with China, its No. 1 trading partner and a fellow member of the BRICS economic grouping, alongside Russia, Brazil, and South Africa.

But Mr. Modi does see China as a regional rival, and shares the growing concern in Washington and allied Asian capitals over China’s expanding military and economic ambitions.

India has points of friction with the U.S. too. Mr. Modi has sat on the fence over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, and he has presided over a steady erosion of civil liberties and press freedom in a country he frequently extols as the world’s largest democracy.

But the main reason why India’s time may have come lies in a simple fact that seems to outweigh Washington’s differences with Mr. Modi.

It is that India is not China.

And that an economically successful, internationally assertive India could provide an important counterweight to China, in Asia and beyond.

Standing next to a sizzling charcoal stove, Sabiti Lukwago scrambles eggs in a bright green cup. He adds a chopped onion then tosses in a handful of cabbage, a pinch of salt, and a dash of chili. As he pours the mixture onto the griddle top, the sizzle of frying egg mingles with the sounds of the city – Afrobeats pouring from the shop next door, a news program on the radio, the rush of Kampala traffic.

But the cook’s concentration is perfect. Just before the egg mixture hardens, he presses a chapati – a disc-shaped flatbread – against it. Then he carefully peels his creation from the stove. Next come slices of fresh tomato and another sprinkle of salt. Finally, he rolls it all into a thin cylinder, and places it in a black plastic bag so it can be eaten quickly with one hand.

“Now our rolex is done,” he says, smiling proudly.

This popular Ugandan street food is named both for its ingredients – rolled eggs – and as a cheeky nod to the expensive watch brand. It is made in minutes and costs less than a dollar. Stalls clutter every corner of Kampala, and its vendors, who often work from dawn to midnight, are symbols of the capital city’s frenetic hustle. 

“It is a very unique thing about Uganda,” says Jonathan Okello, owner of The Rolex Guy, an upmarket Kampala restaurant. “We’ve always had that saying: Here you don’t wear rolex, you eat it.”

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

A man fries rolex eggs at a stall in Kampala, before rolling them into a chapatti to make a rolex, on March, 11, 2023.

But recently, this iconic Ugandan food has been buffeted by events on the other side of the world. As a changing climate and the war in Ukraine drive up the price of two staple ingredients – oil and flour – vendors like Mr. Lukwego have had to raise their prices or shrink their product. A rolex now retails for about 20% more than it did two years ago.

“I used to have many customers, but now people are not so many,” says Ali Kayakumu, another rolex seller. “I make losses, but it is a business. I can’t just quit.”

The rolex’s trouble began in late 2021, when extreme weather conditions damaged soybean crops in South America, driving up the cost of cooking oil for importers like Uganda. The outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 compounded the problem by curtailing sunflower oil and wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, both top global exporters. Conflict spiked the prices of these commodities globally.

In Uganda, costs have nearly doubled in less than two years. A liter of cooking oil, for example, can retail for double the 5,000 ugx ($1.33) it went for in 2021. A kilogram of wheat sets buyers back about about 9,000 ugx ($2.38) compared to 6,500 ugx ($1.72).

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Prices are rising for all the ingredients that go into a rolex, as the price tags in this downtown Kampala shop show, on March 11, 2023.

The sting is felt most acutely by people working in the informal economy, which accounts for half the country’s GDP. “With the increase in cost of production these businesses are going to struggle,” says Brian Sserunjogi, a fellow at the Economic Policy Research Centre in Kampala. He predicts that an overall hike in the cost of living could drive street vendors who live hand to mouth out of business.

Like many Ugandans, Dr. Sserunjogi has a long personal history with the rolex. He remembers eating it often as a university student, sometimes adding roasted meat to his eggs and chapati so the meal was more filling. “It used to make our supper,” the economist says.

But for a food so tied up in Uganda’s identity, the rolex’s origin story is surprisingly hazy.

Chapati was first brought to the country by Indians who were used as indentured laborers by British authorities in the late 19th century to build a railway from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to Kampala, when both Uganda and India were still part of the British empire. The British also imported a European style of cooking eggs, the omelet.

Rumor has it that the first rolex was made by an experimental-minded chapati seller in the eastern city of Jinja in the 1990s. It soon became wildly popular with students at Kampala’s Makarere University, before spreading through the country.

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

A man rolls up a rolex at a stall in the Kampala neighborhood of Kamwokya, on March, 11, 2023.

Today, the simple snack is ubiquitous across Uganda. It has made its way from the streets and into restaurants, such as Mr. Okello’s  The Rolex Guy, which sells riffs on rolex made by adding everything from ground beef to cheese and mushroom. Some of the more expensive options cost about as much as street vendors make in a day. 

Customers at The Rolex Guy often lounge on the eatery’s colorful couches, drinking coffee and fresh juice and chatting over the sounds of reggae music. The rolex “is becoming like a national language,” says Dennis Munyangaraza, who’d dropped by the restaurant to enjoy a late Saturday lunch with friends. “If you can speak the same language, that means you understand each other.”

The cost of cooking oil has now begun to decline slightly in Uganda, but prices still remain higher than they were before December 2021. The global price of wheat, meanwhile, has also leveled off since the initial outbreak of fighting in Ukraine, but remains at a historic high in many countries, including Uganda.

In a bid to improve self-sufficiency, the Ugandan government has pledged to plant some 100,000 hectares of oil palm. But the cultivation process takes about five years, so this will provide no immediate relief to Uganda’s rolex vendors. President Yoweri Museveni also caused an uproar last May when he suggested Ugandans quit worrying about high import prices and instead eat locally grown cassava. 

Katumba Badru/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Nabirye Hafusa works at her husband's rolex stall in the underground parking garage of a shopping mall in Kampala, Uganda, on March, 11, 2023.

That suggestion has bounced off most citizens. “If your favorite food is there, you have to eat it,” says Richard Akadiro, who drives a motorcycle taxi and consumes rolex at least once a day, adding a bit of extra chili to make it spicy.

He spoke on a quick break from work, enjoying a rolex while sitting outside a food stall in downtown Kampala, not far from the now-derelict railway that first brought chapatis to the country.   

Meanwhile, rolex sellers are still frying and hawking their wares, counting on the snack’s iconic status to keep them in business.

“The poor buy rolex,” says vendor Ali Kayakumu. “Even the rich buy rolex. It cuts across.” 

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Mr. Munyangaraza's name.

AP

Residents of the community La Campanera stand at the entrance of the neighborhood in Soyapango, El Salvador, March 5. Even stepping foot on this street would have been unthinkable before the government suspended constitutional rights and started an all out offensive on the gangs one year ago.

It isn’t often that strikingly different approaches to the same problem unfold in politics side by side, enabling societies to measure their relative merits. Yet as gang and drug cartel violence spreads into new areas of Latin America, countries across the region have become laboratories for two strategies that could not be less alike.

In El Salvador, the government has arrested more than 65,000 males accused of gang activity over the past year, some not yet teenagers. The homicide rate has plummeted, and public approval for President Nayib Bukele has soared. Leaders in neighboring countries like Honduras and Guatemala have taken note.

In Colombia, meanwhile, the government has pledged to bring “total peace” to a country that has been destabilized for decades by criminal violence and guerrilla warfare. Skeptics have scoffed at that ambition. But the careful preservation of a delicate truce between rival street gangs this week has reinforced a useful lesson that innocence and the desire for peace are innate and renewable.

Shortly after his inauguration last August, Colombian President Gustavo Petro invited gang leaders in the port city of Buenaventura, a longtime crossroads of criminal violence, to sit together in talks. A shared recognition emerged almost immediately. As one gang delegate told Al Jazeera, the two sides agreed that “it’s unfair that Buenaventura, having a people that is so peaceful, has so much violence and that it’s us that are killing each other. So [we] decided that this had to end.”

Months then passed without a homicide in the city. But earlier this month, the disappearance of one gang’s spokesperson threatened to push the two sides back toward conflict. A broad grouping of civil society organizations banded together to support a resolution. On Tuesday, the government announced that the truce had been restored. The agreement included a recognition that peace requires “confronting with institutional programs the roots of the deep inequality” in Colombian society. “

Total peace,” Mr. Petro has argued, rests as much on tackling corruption and uneven economic opportunity, particularly for women and minorities, as it does on turning violent actors into peace partners.

In El Salvador, human rights groups note, Mr. Bukele’s approach to gang violence required first weakening the independence of democratic institutions like parliament and the judiciary. In Colombia, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace has instructed all government agencies, including the military, to seek to build peace that “protects the life and liberties of the citizens.”

If “we sow love, [if] we dialogue from our differences and finally we manage to understand each other,” Mr. Petro said in his Christmas message to the nation last December, “we will reap in the work that each one of us does for our country.”

Across Latin America, an experiment in peacemaking is unfolding in dragnets and dialogue. One has set democratic values aside in the pursuit of security. The other recognizes that the common good rests on the ability of even those who perpetuate violence to express self-governance.