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Jake Berry had been knocking on doors for three hours in Frisco, Tex., in 2017 when he a made a house call that would change his life. Just days into his new roofing job, Berry was hoping to drum up business after a hailstorm caused widespread roofing damage in the area. A homeowner opened the door with a gun tucked into his waistband and told Berry: “No soliciting.”
Berry retreated, according to court records and Berry’s recollections, but the homeowner followed, telling Berry he didn’t want him there. Then he drew the gun and fired twice at close range.
“The first bullet went through my leg and I didn’t feel it,” said Berry, now 50. He felt the second shot. “It ripped through my abdomen and ripped out the lower part of my pancreas. It felt like someone stepped back and hit my stomach with a sledgehammer as hard as you possibly could.”
Berry’s experience is an outlier among those who work in door-to-door sales, as well as jobs like process serving or political outreach, where door-knocking at a stranger’s home is essential.
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In each incident, someone came to the home or vehicle of a stranger by mistake. In at least two, the alleged shooters said they were afraid or alarmed by the unknown person’s presence: a 16-year-old Black boy knocking on the wrong door, and a 20-year-old White woman in a car with friends who pulled into the wrong driveway while lost.
The characteristics of these recent shooting incidents are still relatively rare and not representative of gun violence more broadly in the United States, according to Tara D. Warner, a sociologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who studies the intersections of fear and protective gun ownership as well as gun use behaviors.
At the same time, she said the shootings “still map on to some general anxiety, hostility, distrust and negativity toward others — and a real sense of needing to protect ourselves and our space.”
For some people in lines of work that require them to visit a stranger’s home unannounced, vigilance is just part of job.
Hal Humphries, a 53-year-old Nashville-based private investigator who trains PIs and process servers, said it’s not uncommon for someone to pull a handgun or shotgun on him at the door — though he notes his most frightening encounter was not with a gun but an ice pick.
Humphries estimated that fewer than a third of his services, usually divorce papers, get dicey. But he acknowledged subtle shifts in society that he occasionally thinks about on the job.
“I think people doing [PI and process serving for] 20-25 years may be thinking about the work differently now,” he said, citing the adoption of body-worn cameras among process servers as evidence.
Humphries doesn’t carry a gun himself, in part because he doesn’t want to be in a situation where he has to shoot someone. There’s “no way” adding another weapon to a tense situation will make things better, he said.
“There is a narrative out there having to do with self-protection that says shoot first, questions later,” he said. “And I think that’s a terrible narrative.”
The shootings and broader anxiety in the parts of the country have weighed on Rachel Berlowe Binder, a 26-year-old Washington-based political campaign professional. As she looks toward the 2024 elections and teaches new teams and volunteer groups, the recent shootings have her thinking about what it means to ask people to knock on a stranger’s door.
She said she knew of people who had faced tense situations while knocking on doors. “But the rise in gun violence and the shootings of strangers accidentally in the wrong place definitely has me and my friends worried about asking people to do this — or doing it ourselves,” she added.
Trespassing laws, which vary by state, can offer some guidance on what protections — or lack thereof — a person has on a stranger’s property. To Berlowe Binder, they’re of little comfort. For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that certain kinds of solicitations, like religious or political groups, cannot be banned under First Amendment grounds.
“But it doesn’t really help to say, ‘Well, the Supreme Court says we’re not a solicitor,’ if there’s a gun in your face,” she said.
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More than half of Americans surveyed in a 2022 Gallup Poll said they worry “a great deal” about crime and violence in the United States — the highest concern since 2016, when it reached the same level but significantly less than the peak of 62 percent in 2001.
But what exactly drives people’s fears about crime is complicated, said Warner, the University of Alabama sociologist. It can range from personal experiences with crime to “abstract threats” — like cultural changes or distrust of the government — that are harder to unpack.
Abstract threats, she said, are why gun purchases surge around major political or cultural events like the coronavirus pandemic or the murder of George Floyd.
Racial bias is another undeniable key factor that feeds into people’s perceptions of fear, according to sociologist Barry Glassner, who wrote the 2010 book “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.” People of color overwhelmingly face the bias of being perceived as more frightening in general, especially to White people, he said.
“Generations now have been taught to fear strangers broadly but not equally,” Glassner said.
Law enforcement acknowledged “a racial component” in last week’s shooting in Kansas City, where 84-year-old Andrew D. Lester, who is White, is charged with shooting 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, who is Black, after the teen went to Lester’s address by mistake. Lester told police that he was “scared to death” of Yarl due to his size, inaccurately describing the 140-pound teen as 6 feet tall — several inches more than his 5-foot-eight stature.
Glassner cited the influence of local TV and cable news as well as politicians who push fear-based narratives around crime as likely drivers of intensifying concerns about strangers.
“We know that as a rule, older people watch a lot of TV news and that the more they watch, the more fearful they are and the more they’re afraid to go out,” he said. For younger generations, Glassner said their fear comes from being raised in a state of hyper-vigilance with “stranger danger” warnings and school lockdown drills.
Meanwhile, the gun industry has capitalized on America’s climate of fear and exploited it to sell more firearms and advance gun-friendly legislation like “stand your ground” laws, according to Ari Freilich, who directs state policy for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“That doesn’t mean you can shoot whomever you want when they’re at your door, but even if you have safe alternatives like running out the back door, you’re not legally required to do so,” Freilich said.
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Self-defense laws known as “stand your ground” statutes and “castle doctrine” exist in the legal framework in a large majority of states: At least 28 states and Puerto Rico allow that a person who is lawfully present in a place has no duty to retreat from an attacker, while at least 10 states have language stating that a person may stand their ground, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The vague language of “stand your ground” can lead to bad outcomes, like in the cases of Trayvon Martin or Ahmaud Arbery, Freilich said. “It sends the unmistakable message to people that you should shoot first and ask questions later, even if the law doesn’t actually allow you to shoot human beings for no reason.”
Berry, the Texas roofer who was shot in 2017, remains in ongoing civil litigation with the homeowner, who struck a plea bargain after his criminal conviction was vacated by the court due to ineffective counsel.
He takes no stance on whether broader gun access is good or bad; in Texas at least, it’s normal to see guns everywhere. But he predicts shootings will rise, especially in incidents like road rage.
“If you’re buying a gun, what are you buying it for? If you want to be trained, that’s good in case you ever need one. But when you’re buying a gun to scare everybody, … pull it out on everybody, I don’t like that. And I think that’s what a lot people are doing because they’re scared and p—ed off at everything,” he said.
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