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Mass Shootings Are Not the Real Problem
Jamelle Bouie [slate.com] 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 [fbi.gov], 44,077 people were murdered with guns, according to the FBI. Just a fraction of those came from Roseburg-style incidents. Many more [huffingtonpost.com] 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 [theatlantic.com] 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 ?
