Mallory+McPW’s+Final+AmEx+2013

Title: Irrational Fears

Creak. Bang. Boom. I roll over and grasp my strategically placed Mace bottle next to my bed. “There must be a murderer in my house,” I think. I don’t know if I should get out of bed because he would hear my footsteps. I look at the clock. 9:57. Wow, this murderer likes to get things going early. I listen again for more noises, but hear nothing. This has been a routine for me since I was probably around 5. My parents bought about 8 “How to Deal with your Anxious Child” books because I was so paranoid about murderers and rapists. On average, I get up at least twice to make sure the doors are locked and all the windows are completely shut. I can’t sleep in complete darkness either. I have a princess crown night light next to my bed that I have had since I was little. My fear of the darkness, irrational as ever, has stayed with me since I was a kid. Embarrassing story. Last week, I actually looked under my bed to make sure there was no one under there before going to the bathroom. I never ever have my back face the door, because then the murderer might sneak up on me and plus I hold my penguin doll over my heart so the bullet would have to go through Penguin too in order to kill me. I used to put glass vases against all the windows in the house so if a murderer were to try to get through the window, the glass vases would fall and crash and that would give me time to call 911 (speed dial on my phone). Through all of my years of paranoia, it has occurred to me that wind would be the best weather for a murderer to come get you in. Because a) people would think it was the wind if the door blew open or if there was a lot of creaking and b) if you start screaming, people might think it is just the howling wind. So that is one of the many reasons that I hate wind. Last week, my nightmare sort of came true. My mom goes to work around 5:20 in the morning and my step dad always walks her out, but this time for some reason there was an idling car parked in front of our house. After my mom left, my step dad, Lee, saw a man across the street in front our neighbors house standing there looking through the panels on the window into the bathroom where my female teenage neighbor showers. That in itself was weird enough, but then the man walked through their side yard into the backyard and disappeared for about 3 minutes. When he came out, Lee stopped him and asked him what he was doing in their backyard. He said that he lost a ball there and was looking for it. Lee ran inside and called 911. Luckily, Lee got his license plate number, so they caught him down on Loma Vista and he went to jail for prowling. Mom and Lee tried to keep that story from me for a while, because they knew that would triple my fear. So every time I get home at night, I sprint from my car to the door in fear that the man has come to have revenge on Lee for putting him in jail. I know that I live in a nice upper middle class suburban neighborhood where things like that only occur occasionally therefore that my fears are irrational. But there are people around the country where the danger is real and they fear for their lives daily. In 2012, there were 16, 259 homicide deaths. 11, 078 of which were gun related. In 2010, 2/3’s of all homicide deaths were perpetrated using guns. I am not going to disregard the statistic that Carson so dutifully told me yesterday, that the homicide rate has gone down from 9.8 in 1990 to 4.8 in 2010. Yes. That is awesome. But America still has a homicide rate 20 times higher than every other developed country. There is an estimated 88.8 civilian guns per 100 people in the United States. To put things into perspective, Ventura County had 13 murders in all of 2011 and 2012. In Chicago, 12 people were murdered in the first 6 days of 2013. Chicago has an average rate of 730 murders per year, which is 18.7% of every 100,000 people. But surprisingly, Chicago doesn’t even make the top 10 cut for deadliest cities. This speech is not me preaching gun control, I promise. If gun control was the simple option, then I would be all for it. In the country I grow old in, I don’t want anyone to rationally be afraid of gunman sneaking through their windows or rapists lurking in the shadows. I don’t want parents to be afraid to send their children to school without armed teachers or to a movie theater without a metal detector. I want my children to be able to sleep soundly in their beds without a container of mace on the ready. I don’t want people to disregard homicide because it isn’t the number one cause of death. It is an issue and just because it doesn’t generally affect me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care about the people who fear for their lives daily.