The Doorstep Shooting Is Becoming a New Institution of a Collapsing America

How Do We Even Make Sense of Americans Massacring Their Neighbors Over…Nothing?

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It was barely a few weeks ago that I had the grim task of writing about the rise of a new kind of implosive American institution: the doorstep shooting. And just yesterday, it happened again, in incredibly bleak and shocking form. A man in Texas was shooting his AR-15 into the air in his backyard, and when his neighbours asked him stop, because their baby was trying to sleep, and it was late at night…he walked over…and killed half the family in cold blood. Including an 8 year old kid.

My God. Think of how…unspeakable it is.

Ten people, all family members, were in the home during the shooting. Five survived, including three children. All the victims were killed at the scene, besides Laso, who died later at a hospital, the sheriff’s office said on Facebook. Two of the women who were killed were found lying on top of the surviving young children in a bedroom, “trying to protect them,” Capers told The Post by phone from the scene.

All five victims were shot in the head, Capers said.

That’s not just a “shooting,” really — a word that’s come to mean next to nothing in America anymore, events of everyday frequency. It’s a massacre.

Think of how unspeakably crazy, how deranged, how off-the-charts violent it is…to shoot an 8-year old kid in the head. For what? Because his parents asked you to…turn it down…hey man, it’s late, put the guns away, we’re trying to sleep over here. Utter, depraved horror — the outer limits of human behavior is what we’re dealing with here. But not just that.

It’s sad that I have to say it, but we should all be able to see it clearly at this point. This is indeed becoming a new American institution — in this sense, institution meaning “fact of everyday life.” The doorstep shooting, the backyard shooting, the neighbor-on-neighbor massacre. Call it what you like — but we need to talk about it, in proper perspective, because on this score, the media is failing, and failing badly.

What happens in collapsing societies? They breed social pathologies. Old kinds, in new variants. They fall into predictable categories. Women are sexually trafficked, or turn to sex work to pay the bills, out of sheer desperation, not really any free choice. Conspiracy theories arise, alongside religious fundamentalism, as people look for imagined character flaws, like a lack of piety, to explain what’s really the larger problem of socioeconomic collapse. Demagogues rise to power, like DeSantis and Trump and MJT, who scapegoat the powerless and innocent. Inequality spirals, and the rich get usually obscenely richer from profiteering off the necessities of life. There’s a reversion to the tribe and the clan — often, literally, the Klan, as in informal organizations that see themselves as paramilitaries who take it upon themselves to police a society, and punish infractions of a pre-modern social order with extreme violence. And alongside all that? Comes the rise of everyday violence.

As societies collapse, these old social pathologies erupt, often in new and bizarre ways. And in America, one of those forms is the doorstep shooting. It falls under the category “the rise of street violence” — which we always see in societies that are failing, but in this uniquely, bizarrely American form. Neighbours have just begun to kill each other. Knock on the wrong door, and some lunatic will just shoot you.

The neighbors walked over and said … “Hey man, can you not do that, we’ve got an infant in here trying to sleep’ or whatever,” Capers said. “They went back in their house and then we have a video of him walking up their driveway with his AR-15.”

Think again, of how depraved this is. It’s hard to even imagine it. You ask someone to turn it down — loud music or a party would be bad enough, but in this case, it’s shooting…for fun. That guy then literally walks up to your front door, and massacres your family.

And now understand that this sort of thing is becoming a regular occurrence. Like I said, it was ten days ago that I wrote about the last few examples, which happened back-to-back — young people knocking on the wrong doors, and being shot for it.

What is happening here? This is what social collapse is. Let me try and discuss it a little bit in a different way this time, almost backwards.

The day after this massacre happened, the Surgeon General wrote an op-ed in the New York Times talking about how loneliness has become such a problem in America that he’s written a whole plan to try and fix it. That plan goes like this — teach the problem in schools, promote social groups, encourage less screen time. No, it’s not just you. Sure, that’s well-intentioned, but…it’s a little weird. The guy’s heart is in the right place…but a plan like that? Has no chance of fixing the problem of American loneliness anymore than you giving free hugs on the street would. It’s not that it’s a bad thing, it’s just that the problem’s….bigger.

How much bigger? Bigger on a frightening scale. And in a different way. The problem that the Surgeon General recognizes? It’s of a different kind entirely. That Americans are so lonely the Surgeon General wants to try and fix the problem? That is the collapse of social bonds between people, among groups, the rupturing of ties.

When I say social collapse, I mean it literally. It’s not some kind of term I use to try and frighten you. It’s meant as a formal term. I don’t use it to imply that Mad Max is around the corner, so that you panic. Not the point at all. One of the things that “collapse” means, technically, formally, is that bonds and ties have imploded at a social scale. Not just in a town here, or a city there — but across society. That’s the problem the Surgeon General’s facing — and it’s good that he’s beginning to reckon with it, but he still hasn’t really grasped what a serious problem it is.

What’s a society…without social bonds? Without ties? Well, it’s one in which it’s much, much easier for things like doorstep shootings and neighbor-on-neighbor massacres to happen. In which such things can become regular occurrences. To the point that they become institutions, just like, say, lining up for a coffee or shaking hands are.

Now. I’m not saying that “these new kinds of shooting are only happening because Americans are lonely!!” Not at all. That’s how pundits will caricature my points, often, but I mean the above in a much more subtle and nuanced way. I’m trying to teach you what social collapse is.

It’s weird. Think about it. If I say “America’s experiencing social collapse,” many people will think to themselves, “what is this guy talking about?” They think about their day. They replay it in their heads. They look for signs of some kind of outsized, extreme Marvel comics level event. It’s not there. They’ve…gone to work. Gone to the store. Walked the dog. Come home. Watched some junk on TV. Nothing much happened. Totally…normal…right? Where’s the collapse? Hey, I had a perfectly trouble-free day?

Ah, but did you? You see, experiencing social collapse is like that. You learn to shrug it off. It all becomes normalized. And after a while? The whole fact of living through a social collapse goes almost unnoticed. So let’s replay that average day in the life of America. What didn’t happen as you went to work, walked the dog, went to the shop, and so on? Well, social bonds and ties didn’t happen. You can spend a week, a month, a year like that in America — and never talk to anyone. Not a single soul. But that’s a vivid form of collapse, because a society in which social bonds and ties don’t exist anymore isn’t really one.