Less than 100 years ago, a person of any age walking down the street with a rifle would have been no more suspicious than someone walking with any other tool. Thirty years ago, a police officer would have at least faced an armed person to find out their intent. Andy Lopez was walking with a toy gun in his hand. A veteran sheriff’s deputy wrongly perceived Andy as a threat, and fearing his toy gun, he killed him. No crime had been committed; Andy had issued no threat. Andy wasn’t even able to turn around and face the deputy. This killing was irrational, motivated by the unchecked fear of a gun and the prevalent law enforcement mentality that every person with a gun must die.

Fear has our society firmly in its grasp. It’s why we lock our doors, use car alarms, put passcodes on phones, use multiple passwords on the web and take our shoes off to fly. We are a nation ruled by fear.

Not the fear of spiders, or the zombie apocalypse, but the ever-increasing threat of physical violence. From a gun in your face or a bomb on your plane to a kicked-in front door, real violence exists everywhere – it’s the only kind of news we seem to hear about. With mass shootings every month in movie theaters, schools, malls and churches, there is no safe place. The specter of the gun is rampant.

America has an enduring relationship with violence: our nation is founded on it. We are a violent people. We kill time, and when turning things off we use the kill switch. We jest about killing one another for petty reasons. “He said what? I’ll kill him.”  To be successful, we make a killing in business. Our children learn that to succeed they must kill, crush, nail or annihilate any opposition.

America is OK with violent death. We like it because we are the best at dealing it. It’s even our right to be able to dispense it at the individual citizen level.

From action movies to video games to playing in the streets, our youths slaughter aliens, thugs and terrorists alike without questioning why. Between gun crime and carnage we are becoming emotionally numb to the horror of it all. Pulling a trigger is as commonplace as running a stop sign.

We have become victim to our own cultural aggression. We seem more afraid of ourselves than global warming.

We could stop making cops’ jobs harder by not publicly exposing guns and only letting criminals get caught with them, but law enforcement could also refrain from killing out of fear. The mindset of shooting every person with a gun is overreactive and the mistakes are too costly for everyone.