A longtime conservative reader sent me an intriguing question recently.
He asked: Is it safe to take your kids to a Cardinals ballgame?
I've been thinking a lot lately about what places are safe. Recently, my husband and I were trying to find a restaurant in St. Charles County that we had never visited before. The GPS directions led us down a wrong street, and my husband pulled into a driveway to turn the car around.
"This is what got that girl killed in New York," I told him. Twenty-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot to death on April 15 for pulling into the wrong driveway in upstate New York. There have been times when I've turned around in an unknown driveway, but I'll think twice about doing that now.
The shooting in New York happened within days of a teenage cheerleader in Texas landing in an ICU: She and a friend were both shot when the friend accidentally tried to enter the wrong car in a grocery store parking lot. That news followed the headlines about Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old in Kansas City, who was shot in the head for ringing the doorbell at the wrong house.
That same week, 6-year-old Kinsley White and her parents were shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard, and a man from Springfield, Missouri, held a gun to a grocery store worker's throat because the meat department was closed and he wanted steak.
It's undeniable that we live in a culture of fear. But I don't think these were the incidents the reader who wrote to me was thinking of.
There's been a steady increase in gun violence in the downtown St. Louis area during the past 15 years, according to University of Missouri-St. Louis researcher Bobby Boxerman. And while the number of homicides in the city has been lower the past two years than it was in 2020, a man was shot and killed at Seventh and Market streets just a couple of weeks ago.
So many of us are afraid of becoming victims of violence in this country -- albeit for different reasons. My reader is afraid of the people he might encounter going to the ballpark in the city; I'm afraid of getting lost in the ultra-conservative part of St. Charles County he lives in. He's an older white man; I'm a middle-aged brown woman.
The through line is that we all know, regardless of political beliefs, that America is a particularly violent place. We disagree on why that is, and the media content we consume reinforces what we already believe.
Missouri Republicans have passed legislation making it easier for anyone to obtain a firearm at any time and bypass a background check. We're one of 27 states that now allow people to carry hidden, loaded handguns in public without a mandatory background check or safety training. Now, Republican lawmakers want to let people carry guns into churches and on public transportation.
Missouri is among the states with the highest rates of gun violence. And let's be honest: Is anyone surprised?
State Rep. Peter Merideth has repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of Republicans who rail about crime in St. Louis but keep rejecting efforts to actually address the issue. They've voted against: allowing St. Louis police to take away a person's guns if they have been deemed a high risk to themselves or others; allowing local police to work with federal law enforcement to reduce gun violence; and allowing municipalities to prohibit minors from carrying loaded guns in public.
Merideth proposed that last measure just two weeks ago, and every Republican representative rejected it. Makes you question how real their fear of attending baseball games is.
Our country has let guns become the No. 1 cause of death for kids and teens -- despite knowing there are laws that could prevent many of those deaths.
But it's our perceptions that shape our fears.
I asked a friend who lives in the city if she felt it was safe to take her children to a ballgame.
"I'm going to keep living my life," she said. "I'm not hiding in a cul-de-sac in fear."
I think this is the approach most American parents have taken. We have no choice but to send our children to school, where the chances of getting shot are higher than at Busch Stadium.
We take them to ballgames; we let them visit their friends and participate in school activities.
And we pray they don't get shot for knocking on the wrong door.