I hear gunshot frequently up here. Fifteen years of weekends at the Russian River have taught me that people hunt squirrels and rabbits, shoot at targets, scare off crows or other vermin, and sometimes fire their guns just for the hell of it. So the three shots Tuesday morning weren’t particularly startling. A few seconds apart. Strangely muffled, but not by distance. I wasn’t even completely sure they were gunshots.
Minutes later, M-, my grandmotherly neighbor called. Her message dispelled any doubt about the shots. I was glad that I was alone for the moment. My landline voicemail broadcasts incoming messages out loud, and the therapy patient I was supposed to be meeting via television had been a no-show. My job isn’t to have patients worry about my safety.
“Hi John, I just wanted to alert you. This is M-. There’s an emergency. Lock your doors. Stay in your house. R-, who’s just a wonderful wonderful man, he’s done a lot of work, and he did the fence, has just been shot, and maybe killed, by his son, who has a psychiatric disorder. The police are out, here, with big guns.”
I was sitting at my computer, less than eight feet from the middle of a large picture window, with a bright ring light shining a target on my face. Almost Hollywood perfect for a bullet to shatter the 42 square feet of glass before exploding my head like a melon. Even before locking the door, I went to close the blind.
A few sheriff department cars clustered half a block away. Several officers, clad in green helmets to match their shirts and pants, clotted the street. Most of them had big rifles and ammo slung across their chests. I thought of Putin’s “little green men” in Crimea. More cars drove up and parked.
The blind drawn, I returned to my desk and emailed M- to thank her for the warning. Having lived here full time for just a month, I hadn’t received any of the automated text alerts that went out to the neighborhood. For the next hour I shouted into the phone with my next patient, a hundred year old man. The effort to make myself heard distracted me from most of the commotion outside. But I did detect a few more cars swishing past, and helicopter rotors thumping overhead.
Just before noon, I emailed M- again. I figured that they had caught the shooter by now. I proposed we go for a walk, knowing that she’d be eager to escape her house and unburden herself. She typed back that she’d be ready in five minutes.
From my doorway I counted sixteen law enforcement vehicles. Because the street curves, I couldn’t even see that more cop cars were parked, six houses down, in front of the shooting site itself. There were cars from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department, thirty five miles to the north, and from the City of Sonoma Police, forty-two miles to the east. And a big olive colored armored truck, “SWAT” stenciled on the side, with four armed and armored men in the open compartment in back. Creepiest of all was the big white, windowless panel truck, with no identifying markers whatsoever.
The men, and they were all men, gathered in groups of two or three. Some peered intently at the houses. One guy tried several times to launch and land a drone midstreet.
M- and I met on the road in front of our houses. She had heard from neighbors that R- was indeed dead. She walked up to the officer in the nearest car, and asked him if it was okay to take a walk. He recommended against it. This was an active shooter situation. They were about to bring in dogs for a yard to yard search. The whole neighborhood was cordoned off.
Torn between wanting to talk, and seeking safety inside, M- stood furtively in my driveway for a few minutes. She told me about what a sweet man R- was, that every time he saw her he hugged her and said he loved her. How the schizophrenic son had been trouble for years, and even worse after he started using meth. The son slept in a black corrugated plastic irrigation tube in the woods in back of a house at the end of the block. R- had just brought his son breakfast before the shooting. R- had a hard life since coming from Mexico. Once he had been beaten so badly by people who hated immigrants that he had been left for dead. Semi-retired, he did handiwork around the neighborhood. Two years ago R- had worked with another neighbor to rebuild the fence that separated M’s yard from ours.
M- returned to her house. She urged me to go back inside mine. A killer was on the loose. Several dozen heavily armed, and who-knows-how-attentive-or-well-trained men were milling about, yards from my home. It felt surreal. A few days later, a friend told me that he had watched a tv episode that very night depicting the very scene that I had described. Somehow I was bothered by the absence of bullhorns. They always accompanied similar scenarios in my (outdated?) movie watching. Mundane text alerts lacked the drama of megaphones.
I headed up my driveway. Our homes are our castles, right? Being able to lock doors and pull blinds creates a semblance of safety. But it was a lovely, warm afternoon, and I wanted to garden for an hour in the sunshine before my next telesession. The backyard was enclosed, and further away from all of those guys with guns. Was inside really safer?
Freud coined the psychological term “undoing” to describe a defense mechanism in which a person tries to cancel out a threatening thought by engaging in contrary behavior. Was going to pull weeds my way of negating the chance of being shot? Would my attempt at undoing be my undoing? Or was I giving undue attention to the destructive power of firearms and machismo?
How much danger was I in anyway? An hour and a half after killing his father, was the shooter really likely to be lurking in a neighborhood swarming with lawmen, rather than retreating to the acres of deserted redwood forest nearby? If he wanted to shoot someone else, wouldn’t one of these deputies make better targets than me?
The public still equates being mentally ill with being a threat to others. Once Putin invaded Ukraine, look at how rapidly we piled on to condemn him as “losing it,” “crazy,” and “psychotic.” Strangely, while we seem to view mentally ill people as potential killers, we also deem most murderers to be sane, and deserving of punishment because of their hold on reality.
So how much danger was I really in? Part of our sense of security stems not only from what we conclude about a situation, but also how certain we are of our assessment. Magnitude and proximity to the threat, our certainty about the danger, and our feelings about whether we can control the outcome all contribute to our sense of security.
People act for reasons, even if their motives might not make sense to us. If a “sane” gunman killed his father during an argument, he would probably only consider me a threat if I were blocking his escape, or if he thought I was a witness to his crime.
The shooter hadn’t been observed in the area for a full hour and a half now. I figured I was more at risk of being shot by one of the officers. Privileged by my pale face, maroon dress shirt, and khaki slacks, they weren’t likely to mistake me for the killer. But I had put on my sweat stained safari hat to go walking. The one that I wore when weeding the front yard, that had made at least two neighbors inquire if I was a paid gardener. Did I look strange enough, or were my facial features shadowy enough, to cause a cop to be suspicious? That same week, a jury had deemed it within a cop’s line of duty to blindly fire ten shots into neighboring apartments when he felt threatened. I didn’t want to be collateral damage.
If an agitated person waves a loaded gun in our face, calculating risk is easy. Get out of there! But in more nuanced situations there is room for a much broader range of conclusions. Which creates fertile ground for contentious arguments about whether behaviors constitute reasonable risks or hazardous habits.
If COVID-19 killed 98% plus of its victims, as HIV/AIDS used to do before effective antiviral treatments, nobody would have resisted public health measures. Or if it killed two-thirds of infected people, with blood pouring from their eyes and mouths, like Ebola, or even just a third were killed off, like bubonic plague, we would have had consensus about how to change our behaviors.
Or, conversely, if it were as trivial as the common cold, or even the seasonal flu, almost nobody would have panicked. The lethality of this coronavirus fell in a gray zone, where reasonable people could differ about their subjective sense of risk. This ambiguity also provided an opportunity for political exploitation, to either magnify or minimize the threat. But even in the absence of misinformation, “the science” alone provides only one factor in our perceptions of danger.
In the early months of lockdown, I looked at bicyclists in San Francisco. Many wore masks, many wore helmets, but some didn’t. At that time, city edicts demanded both mask and helmet wearing. To me, masks and helmets both provided two things. They were a way to protect yourself from uncertain threats in the world, and they served to reduce society’s potential burden in the event of medical calamity. Masks reduced the likelihood you would inhale infectious particles, particularly since infectious people without symptoms might be breathing on you. Helmets protect your head from damage in accidents, which can occur even if you bike responsibly. Preventing or delaying your own case of Covid-19 reduced the caseload on overwhelmed hospitals and provided more time for researchers to develop preventive or curative treatments. Avoiding having your cranium crushed saves society huge medical costs.
So I figured there would be a strong correlation between mask and helmet wearing — some people would value their own safety and the costs to society, and others wouldn’t really care. I thought that there would be a lot of mask-and-helmet wearers, some no-mask-no-helmet, but very few no-mask-yes-helmet or no-helmet-yes-mask wearers. But after observing a few hundred bicyclists, I found four roughly equal groups. The double yeses were somewhat larger than the other three groups, but not by much. Plenty of people thought it fine to wear a mask but no helmet, or helmet but no mask. People’s perceptions of threat simply differed from my own notions. Similarly (again, aside from purposeful misinformation) some people perceived masks as protecting them from danger, while others viewed masks themselves as a threat.
Our society has not been doing a good job of appreciating that our sense of security is subjective. We can look at all of the statistics we want, but they won’t determine, in and of themselves, what is “safe” or what is “dangerous”. Is an infectious agent with 0.5% lethality dangerous? Is one with 99.5% survival rates safe? Is it safe to live in a democracy that borders a massive, authoritarian regime? Is it safe until they actually invade, but not after? If your neighborhood hasn’t yet been hit by wildfires, torrential storms, heatwaves, or freak freezes, are you safe from the climate crisis?
My backyard beckoned. Glorious sunshine bathed the waves of weeds calling to be uprooted. As I crouched down to do my gardening (and maintain a low profile) my yard offered two rounds of protection. Ironically, (or maybe forged steel-ically) the gate’s noisy drop-latch, installed by R- himself, would alert me to anyone stealing into the space. And a half century of birdwatching finally provided a practical benefit: the jays hopping along the fence and the sparrows scratching in the leaves confirmed that nobody was already lurking in my enclosure, and would warn me if anyone did approach.
After an hour outside, I returned to my computer for my next meeting. Behind the window shade, cop cars continued to drift by, and more helicopters churned the air. During one mid-afternoon break, I pulled aside a corner of the blind. Armed men still dotted the street. Two German Shepherds strained at their leashes. Some of the officers appeared tense and vigilant. Others were more relaxed, chatting, glancing at their phones, almost like it was a take-your-child to work day.
I watched M- drive off to an appointment in the city. Armed officers were manning a checkpoint at the entrance to the neighborhood, so she had to drive out by the unbarricaded back road.
Almost a decade ago, upon hearing that my twins’ elementary school was staging an “active shooter” drill, I was unfamiliar with the term. I briefly wondered why they were teaching kids about the wiggly worm at the bottom of a small glass of tequila. The term “active shooter” surged in usage after the 2012 Aurora Movie Theater shooting. To me it sounds like a phrase conjured up the gun industry. My thesaurus tells me that “active” can mean energetic, sporty, vigorous, sprightly, and zestful. No flaccid, passive shooters for us.
Actually, despite what the officer said, the situation in my neighborhood didn’t qualify as an active shooter event. Our neighborhood was neither a confined area nor a densely populated one. The victim wasn’t selected at random. And the shooter had fled the scene, which only happens in 1% of active shooter cases. We were dealing with the far more common scenario of domestic violence, which tends to kill far more people but garner much less media attention than active shooter events.
Hollywood and the gun lobby have worked hard at convincing people that only a good guy with a gun can save us from bad people with guns. They’ve perpetuated the myth that owning a gun makes you safer, rather than just creating the illusion of safety. The NRA has worked strenuously to suppress research showing that a household gun increases your own risk of being shot and killed. Armed, trained professionals didn’t stop mass murder at the Pulse night club, or at Stoneman Douglas or Columbine high schools. Mass shooters have the element of surprise and the luxury of not worrying about bystanders — there are no bystanders, just additional targets.
When I’ve shared this narrative, many listeners expressed concern about the shooter, imagining the likelihood of his being killed while being apprehended. Obviously, I survived to tell my story, so they didn’t have to worry about my safety. Late that afternoon, in a different neighborhood on the other side of the vast redwood forest, someone reported seeing a man matching the police description. Six and a half hours and six miles from the shooting, the killer was caught, unharmed, and is now in jail.
Our neighbors held a memorial for R- a dozen days after his death, in the field across from my house.
I moved up to the Russian River for family reasons. My primary objective wasn’t to leave the grime and crime of the city, although I had anticipated that would be a fringe benefit. I miscalculated. Intellectually, I already knew that violence can happen anywhere, and this realization burns more vividly and viscerally in my body. My semblance of safety was shaken, but not eradicated.
New plagues will visit our world. Too many guns guarantee that too many people will be killed. A warming planet will wipe out millions of people. Insecure dictators will wage wars. Danger abounds. In some places you’re more bound to run into it than others. You can live bound up by fear. But I feel safe up here. Not perfectly safe, but safe enough.
Whether undoing or my undoing, when I go running, I still leave the house unlocked.
