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Jamelle Bouie writes that, everyday gun violence in black communities kills many more Americans. Why do we keep ignoring it ?
There are two truths about gun homicide in America. The first is that we have a mass shooting problem. On Thursday, 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer opened fire on a community college campus in Roseburg, Oregon. He killed 9 people and wounded 7 others—allegedly singling out Christian students—before he was killed in a shootout with police. "Roseburg" joins "Charleston, "Isla Vista," "Newtown," "Aurora," and "Oak Creek" on the long list of small towns and quiet cities marred by horrific gun violence.
Highly visible, these shootings are the focal point for most of our national conversation on gun control. The last serious legislation for universal background checks came just after the murder of 20 6- and 7-year-olds and six adult staff members at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, which resulted in national calls for new action. (It died in the Senate at the hands of a GOP-led and blue-dog Democrat–supported filibuster.) But as much as the attention makes sense, it also obscures that second truth about gun homicides in America: Ending mass shootings won't solve the problem.
Between 2009 and 2013, 44,077 people were murdered with guns, according to the FBI. Just a fraction of those came from Roseburg-style incidents. Many more were domestic violence against women. But the large majority involved the deaths of men, and of those, most involved poor black Americans in inner cities and other marginalized areas. "From 1980 to 2013, 262,000 black males were killed in America," writes Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic. In general, when we talk about gun homicide in the United States, we are largely talking about violence between poor black men.
What does SN think could be the solution to this issue?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:16PM
I think that maybe GP was referring to copycat shooters. The lowlife in this case apparently studied prior mass shootings, according to a couple of articles. He was a copycat. Without the 24/7 coverage, and repeated broadcast of these atrocities, fewer unbalanced people might think of doing something like this.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:36PM
I strongly doubt that's the case. There is a lot of hurt and anger in these individuals.
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(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday October 04 2015, @09:54PM
Murders of all types are down, gun shootings are down -- the fact is that the world is less dangerous now than it was 30 years ago. Why do we feel so anxious though? 30 years ago you sat down at 7 to watch the news, or read the paper in the morning. You didn't have mobile alerts making sure you could be induced into a false sense of terror at any second of the day, nor did you have gaggles of reporters spending all day reporting on a subject by interviewing each other on the air about what they don't know yet, and you sure didn't have those "What you need to know about ___" headlines -- as if #1, the event has any effect on your life, and #2, that the publisher is some kind of authority on the matter.
The main problem with violence in America is not that we are experiencing more of it -- we aren't, we are experiencing less -- it's that we are experience several magnitudes of orders more HYPE about it, and secondly, that the hype is basically inescapable.
Finally, as a side note, concentrated problems are easier to deal with than distributed problems. Having fewer shootings but in concentrated settings gives us the opportunity to plan, prepare, and intercept those violent acts in a way we could never do in the context of a dozen random shootings, by a dozen random people, in a dozen random places. The concentration of the violence is an opportunity to vastly reduce the effectiveness of mass shooters, and to further depress murder stats, and opportunity we'd never have if the same violence was distributed.