Race and Guns In America

Stewart made an excellent point on the Daily Show last night. If you think nothing can be done to curb gun violence, that there are just too many guns, and too many committed Alex Joneses, working in willing collaboration with too many NRA bought and paid for politicians like Harry Reid & Tom Cotton, think again. In the 32 years of its existence when MADD was started by a group of young mothers "with a mission to stop drunk driving", from its tiny beginning in 1980 until today, the rate of drunk driving deaths has declined by nearly 2/3, from 27,000 per year to around 10,000. That is still obviously too many, but what a difference. Drunk driving still accounts for one in three traffic fatalities, but among young people the drop off has been even steeper. That is a stunning (and hopeful) record of success. America did not become a police state to solve this problem, but as Stewart said (paraphrasing here), a thirty year campaign of committed effort to change public attitudes and pass saner, more reasonable, legislation at the Federal, State and Local levels has saved tens of thousands of lives.

By an ironic twist of fate, there are currently about 30,000 deaths every year in the US as a result of gun violence. This is a few thousand more deaths by guns than the number of alcohol deaths at the time MADD launched, but it does seem to frame the problem in similar terms. Tragically, about 2/3 of deaths by guns are suicides. Though the heinous nature of the mass murders by assault rifles catches the world’s attention, FBI statistics show that in 2009 there were 9,146 gun murders. Only a fraction, 348, were the result of shootings with a rifle. Handguns, cheap, easily concealed and trafficked, cause far more death, and scar far more families. They accounted for 2/3 of all gun homicides.   

Gun advocates would have us believe that this shows the fallacy of gun safety efforts. They argue that banning large magazines and assault weapons would barely dent the gun death statistics. The killings in Newtown, they suggest must be tolerated for the joy of their sport, their hobby. This seems to me to be nearly criminally insane (see Alex Jones), but let’s set that aside for a moment.

The same groups continually point to what everyone agrees is an obscene level of gun violence and death in the cities, Chicago in particular, where laws are quite strict. They say, “See? What have your guns laws accomplished there?” They raise a fair point with two qualifications. The first I saw Buzz Bissinger make yesterday. I have been screaming it at my TV for weeks. For all the outrage over Newtown, (the savage and cowardly acts committed there deserve every bit of that outrage), the real horror, the real scandal, committed by the NRA and gun manufacturers, and tolerated by America is the genocide going on in the black community at the hands of cheap handguns.  The second and critical challenge that the NRA comments on Chicago and other urban centers indicates is thatthe killings there show is the crying, literally, need for Federal legislation. We can actually agree with The NRA here. Local laws are inadequate to stop the carnage. But we cannot agree that creates an argument against local legislation. No, No. It actually makes the case for federal legislation. Chicago shows that municipalities and states, even those committed to gun safety, cannot go it alone. NYC mayor Bloomberg has shown through undercover operations and the NYC police department’s  own statistics, that most of the homicides in the city are caused by guns trafficked from states with lenient gun purchases regulations, especially multiple gun purchases and porous background check systems. Gun shows are a big part of the equation that Bloomberg has exposed as a cause of real and specific acts of gun violence in New York.

Forget the spurious arguments about how more people are killed with hammers and ball bats then rifles. True enough, but in both cases the numbers are miniscule. About 500 people are killed a year by rifles, and another 600 year by attack by blunt object. By comparison The FBI says in 2009 there were over 6,000 murders by pistols. But this is a far important statistic, of all the gun deaths, over half the destruction is visited on the homes of African American families.

http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/gunviolence/factsethnicity

And that is the real obscenity and the insane irony of the moment. The face of gun ownership and 2^nd amendment fervor in America is a white middle aged man supposedly protecting his family from the criminal element, and as Stewart said the threat of a dystopian America under a tyrannical government.  Alex Jones could fairly be described as their poster boy. Gun makers have increased both sales and profits by marketing this image for decades. It is a lie. There are far more pistols in circulation, and they are killing young African Americans at a shocking rate. But to do something about gun violence that will require a much more concerted effort than the palliative act of passing an assault weapons ban. To do something about that violence, America would have to face up to the failure to address race as a root of poverty in our midst. America would have to confront the tragic performance of kids in schools where poverty is a reality and hope is rationed in the smallest of portions. To do something to stop thousands of young black boys being killed every year by guns, America would have to have a confrontation with honesty. Tough one, maybe we ought to just pass the assault weapons ban, background checks, and ban large magazines.

Americans truly committed to ending gun violence might ask where in all this talk about the fiscal cliff and tax breaks for millionaires is there any dialogue about the need to improve the performance of children in districts with high degrees of poverty, or to do something to cut joblessness in the African community which runs twice that of whites. America truly committed to ending gun violence might want to challenge their own deep seated—but never mentioned in polite society beliefs—that “those people just don’t want to help themselves” and so mostly deserve what they get. What they get and America gets is a genocidal epidemic of African American gun violence deaths all out of proportion to their demographic place in America.

Martin Luther King famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The effective 30-year campaign that Mothers Against Drunk Driving has waged resulted in a stunning and in many ways hopeful decline in driving fatalities caused by alcohol. MADD;s efforts are proof positive that Dr. King was right. Will it take 30 more years for America to take sane and necessary steps to curb gun violence?