Who Pays for the Right to Bear Arms?
By DAVID COLE
Pravda on the Hudson
Published: January 1, 2013
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IN the days following the Newtown massacre the nation’s newspapers were filled with heart-wrenching pictures of the innocent victims. The slaughter was unimaginably shocking. But the broader tragedy of gun violence is felt mostly not in leafy suburbs, but in America’s inner cities.
The right to bear arms typically invokes the romantic image of a cowboy toting a rifle on the plains. In modern-day America, though, the more realistic picture is that of a young black man gunned down in his prime in a dark alley. When we celebrate gun rights, we all too often ignore their disproportionate racial burdens. Any effort to address gun violence must focus on the inner city.
Last year Chicago had some 500 homicides, 87 percent of them gun-related. In the city’s public schools, 319 students were shot in the 2011-12 school year, 24 of them fatally. African-Americans are 33 percent of the Chicago population, but about 70 percent of the murder victims.
The same is true in other cities. In 2011, 80 percent of the 324 people killed in Philadelphia were killed by guns, and three-quarters of the victims were black.
Racial disparities in gun violence far outstrip those in almost any other area of life. Black unemployment is double that for whites, as is black infant mortality. But young black men die of gun homicide at a rate eight times that of young white men. Could it be that the laxity of the nation’s gun laws is tolerated because its deadly costs are borne by the segregated black and Latino populations of North Philadelphia and Chicago’s South Side?
The history of gun regulation is inextricably interwoven with race. Some of the nation’s most stringent gun laws emerged in the South after the Civil War, as Southern whites feared what newly freed slaves might do if armed. At the same time, Northerners saw the freed slaves’ right to bear arms as critical to protecting them from the Ku Klux Klan.
In the 1960s, Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party made the gun a central symbol of black power, claiming that “the gun is the only thing that will free us.” On May 2, 1967, taking advantage of California’s lax gun laws, several Panthers marched through the State Capitol in Sacramento carrying raised and loaded weapons, generating widespread news coverage.
The police could do nothing, as the Panthers broke no laws. But three months later, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed into law one of the strictest gun control laws in the country.
The urban riots of the late 1960s — combined with rising crime rates and a string of high-profile assassinations — spurred Congress to pass federal gun control laws, banning interstate commerce in guns except for federally licensed dealers and collectors; prohibiting sales to felons, the mentally ill, substance abusers and minors; and expanding licensing requirements.
These laws contain large loopholes, however, and are plainly inadequate to deal with the increased number and lethality of modern weapons. But as long as gun violence largely targets young black men in urban ghettos, the nation seems indifferent. At Newtown, the often all-too-invisible costs of the right to bear arms were made starkly visible — precisely because these weren’t the usual victims. The nation took note, and President Obama has promised reform, though he has not yet made a specific proposal.
Gun rights defenders argue that gun laws don’t reduce violence, noting that many cities with high gun violence already have strict gun laws. But this ignores the ease with which urban residents can evade local laws by obtaining guns from dealers outside their cities or states. Effective gun regulation requires a nationally coordinated response.
A cynic might propose resurrecting the Black Panthers to heighten white anxiety as the swiftest route to breaking the logjam on gun reform. I hope we are better than that. If the nation were to view the everyday tragedies that befall young black and Latino men in the inner cities with the same sympathy that it has shown for the Newtown victims, there would be a groundswell of support not just for gun law reform, but for much broader measures.
If we are to reduce the inequitable costs of gun rights, it’s not enough to tighten licensing requirements, expand background checks to private gun sales or ban assault weapons. In addition to such national measures, meaningful reform must include initiatives directed to where gun violence is worst: the inner cities. Aggressive interventions by police and social workers focused on gang gun violence, coupled with economic investment, better schools and more after-school and job training programs, are all necessary if we are to reduce the violence that gun rights entail.
To tweak the National Rifle Association’s refrain, “guns don’t kill people; indifference to poverty kills people.” We can’t in good conscience keep making young black men pay the cost of our right to bear arms.
David Cole is a professor of constitutional law and criminal justice at the Georgetown University Law Center.
IMHO David Cole is partially right.........And wrong when he invokes poverty as the reason for the high homicide rates in certain US populations. Poverty alone does not create violence, and no reputable study has shown a legitimate correlation between poverty and violent crime.
The root of violence in African American communities is associated with poverty, but not caused by it.......the dirty secret is that US drug policies, not poverty, not guns, are the direct link to the extraordinarily high homicide rates in African American communities in particular and the US in general........Specifically the way in which the 'drug war' has been fought since the early 1960's.........
Drug laws and law enforcement targeted black drug dealers with often violent tactics that would never have been tolerated in white communities, incarcerating large numbers of poor blacks in numbers vastly disproportionate to white criminals, and the result was the institutionalization and indoctrination into violent prison culture of generations of black men.......Leaving generations of black families broken, and generations of black children without fathers.
The result of that indoctrination in to prison gang culture? The bringing of that culture back to the streets where it was adopted as violent streets gang culture by the children of those men.........A culture that has perpetuated along with the illegal blackmarket drug trade.
If we want to know what has made America the violent country it is today..........One thing and one thing only........75% of the homicide rate of this country is a direct or indirect consequence of the drug war.........And if we weren't warehousing record numbers of Americans since 1992 with mandatory minimum sentences we'd be seeing higher rates than we are now. Without the 75% of the homicides attributed to the drug war, we'd have a homicide rate equal to Great Britains..........1.4 per 100,000..........A rate you see in the US among groups of similar socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds..........Britain is 92% European heritage..........So is the state of Wyoming, Vermont and New Hampshire, all have lax gun laws, all have populations 92% give or take European........All with homicide rates of 1.4 per 100,000 or less.
Poverty is a contributor..........But not the cause. There are plenty of places in the US with high poverty rates and low homicide rates. Brownsville, Tx is a prime example of a medium sized American city with 92% hispanic minority population, high poverty and a homicide rate actually BELOW the national average....Poverty doesn't drive homicide rates..........In a general sense, a marginalized population that perceives itself victimized by the larger population and viewing the official law enforcement/judicial system as illegitimate correlates to high homicide rates.
One can examine hispanic communities to really see the dichotomy of American society......In places like Brownsville, with long established community ties, violence is low........In places where newly transplanted Hispanic immigrants find themselves in conflict with the same black communities and gang culture that have resulted from the drug war, we see extraordinarily high homicide rates. In areas along the US/Mexican border along major drug distribution routes, large influxes of drug money has driven extraordinarly high homicide and violence rates.
South Africa may be the best example of this........A larger marginalized minority (in their case a majority) population and a homicide rate over 10 TIMES the US rate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7KTVbJj3YBeing indoctrinated in to violent prison gang culture and the destruction of the black family is the root of the violence far more than 'guns' or poverty.
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