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#WearOrange Is the New Abandonment of Black Communities
Thursday was Gun Violence Awareness Day, and its proponents encouraged people to #WearOrange as a show of support for new gun control legislation. What legislation, they don’t say. They take it as given, though, that guns are the problem. That reducing gun ownership is the way to reduce gun deaths.
Violence isn’t morally worse when committed with a firearm; murder is just as much an outrage and tragedy, regardless of the weapon used. But, for the sake of argument, consider the gun-control premise that “gun violence” is a meaningful distinction as we investigate some facts. There are about 32,000 firearm-related deaths in the United States each year (the total has been declining), of which approximately 21,000 are suicides and 11,000 homicides. But there is more to the story: American homicide and suicide rates differ greatly by race and sex. Among whites, 77 percent of gun deaths are suicides; among African Americans, 82% of gun deaths are homicides. If my math is right, black men are nine times more likely to be the victim of gun-related homicide than white men, or women of any race.
And we know some things about these homicides. First, most of them are intraracial. According to DOJ statistics from 1980-2008, 84 percent of white homicide victims were murdered by whites, and 93 percent of black victims were murdered by blacks. Second, there are racial disparities in the circumstances of homicides. For example, blacks constitute over 60% of drug-related homicide victims and nearly two-thirds of perpetrators. And third, much of the violence is concentrated in our large urban centers. Drug-related and gang-related killings are overwhelmingly urban phenomena, and guns are used disproportionately in gang-related homicides (see DOJ link above).
It’s difficult to find current data on gun-related homicide rates by city. However, as of 2006-07, New Orleans (60.2 percent black in 2010) had 62 gun-related homicides per 100,000 residents, 15 times the overall US rate of just over 4 murders per 100,000. Detroit (83 percent black), had 36. Baltimore (64 percent black), 30. Oakland (28 percent black), 27. Newark (52 percent black), 25. St. Louis (49 black), 24.1. Richmond (51 percent black), 23. Washington, DC (50 percent black), 19.
A public official who wants to reduce gun violence, and save black lives, should know where to start: The lawlessness in our inner cities. That’s where the gun crime is, that’s where the victims are.
But Obama’s Department of Justice has not made enforcement a priority. According to statistics compiled by the National Rifle Association, federal gun crime prosecutions have fallen 40 percent under his presidency (well outpacing the overall decline in gun crime); this trend has even been acknowledged by Mother Jones. Or consider that, while gun control advocates blame the carnage in Chicago on straw purchases in states with looser gun laws, prosecution of straw purchasers is exceedingly rare. BATFE officials admit that “charging straw buyers falls towards the bottom of federal prosecutors’ priority lists”.
Indeed, instead of stepping-up enforcement, Obama’s DoJ has racialized what should be individual justice, using the spurious logic of “disparate impact.” In the wake of organized mob violence in Ferguson and Baltimore, the DoJ has elected to scrutinize police departments that deploy resources in predominantly black neighborhoods, and blamed racism for higher black incarceration rates. The administration has backed the end of New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy, designed to take illegal guns off the street, because blacks were searched disproportionately. As President Obama has been pursuing an initiative to grant clemency and pardons to “non-violent drug offenders,” the beneficiaries have included quite a few convicted of gun crimes.
Predictably, destigmatizing criminality has led to an increase in violent crime. But this then puts the Left in a quandry: Whom to blame? They have recast the actual perpetrators as victims of a white power structure. This leaves them in the silly position of assigning responsibility to the guns, which have no agency. Rather than do the hard work of prosecuting violent individuals, Democratic politicians — including our nation’s chief law enforcement officer — resort to cheap words. They blame the NRA and lawful gun owners, and preen about the need for unspecified new laws even as existing laws go unenforced.
Meanwhile, inner city gangs and predators kill more black victims, catching both other criminals and innocents in the crossfire. And no amount of orange clothing or hashtag activism will make them safer.
Published in Culture, Domestic Policy, Guns
Could you get a bit specific? Let’s use Obama’s lovely Chicago as an example. How would you plan to get the Black P Stone Nation, the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords, the Latin Kings, the Crips, the Bloods, the Black Mafia/Nation of Islam, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mickey Cobras and a few dozen other smaller gangs to stop shooting each other in territorial competition for control of drugs, prostitution, protection, general street crime, and just plain territory in just four years? It seems to me that in four years to equalize the white and black murder rates, you’re gonna have to just start shootin’ a bunch of white folks.
I thought of that after I went to bed… “Uh oh…you can equalize the white and black murder rates in more ways than one!”
Perhaps. But I’m skeptical. The well is poisoned from so many sources, in the Black community. In Chicago and many other cities police trying to make arrests are surrounded by mobs who chant “F- the Police” (from a popular rap). They interfere and encourage resistance. Refuse to testify and threaten those who do cooperate. I suggest looking at White Girl Bleed A lot or Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry for concrete examples of whats going on. Second City Cop blog gives lots of examples of what inner city police are up against.
I’m not okay with it. I don’t care if they “show concern.” I want public policy to do good, or, at a bare minimum, do no further harm.
Progressive do not ever seem to ask themselves “will it do good?” (and is it even feasible?) before advocating public policies. Instead, they feel good about themselves for what almost universally turn out to be the destructive policies they advocate. Showing concern is just virtue signaling.
I should have said that I’d be
more sympatheticless disgusted by proposals for new gun laws—we would have a better starting point for the debate—if they gnashed their teeth about black victims or, for that matter, took seriously the problem of black lives wasted because criminality is part of the inner-city subculture. I agree that it is a huge and worrying problem that so many young black men are in prison. The difference lies in identifying the root cause. If it’s “racism” you let them out. If it’s “they are coming out of a seriously screwed up subculture” you don’t let them out, but you do start to look at what the government (and the larger society) is doing to enable and encourage that subculture.Oh—and if you say “racism” and let them out, the chances are really good that your neighborhood will stay safe while the neighborhoods they return to will become yet more dangerous. Moral preening indeed.
Yes, exactly.
But, the screwed up subculture isn’t really amenable to government fixes, is it? This gets back to Spengler’s brother’s comment about the impulse to restate complicated problems so as to make them seem easier to solve, and explains why the typical progressive will oppose real solutions — like return to religion and its moral demands on the individual.
This discussion reminds me a bit of the book, “Andersonville,” about the Confederate prison. I read the book decades ago, but as I remember it the commandant took a hands-off approach to the internal conditions, and the prison was essentially run by the worst elements, including New York City gangsters, who preyed upon the weak, taking all their warm clothing, stealing their rations, etc. It wasn’t until the good men banded together under some decent leadership and did battle against the gangs and defeated them that some kind of order was restored, and the prison became reasonably survivable. I say “reasonably” because conditions were still deplorable.
Is there an analogy there to what is going to have to happen in the black neighborhoods of Chicago?
Well, to begin with you could stop incentivizing bad behavior, right? One of the truly bizarre things about welfare culture (white or black) is that grown men wander around the neighborhood doing nothing productive, and for some reason they don’t starve. (Boy, that sounds harsh doesn’t it?)
I don’t know, MWTA: I think S of S’s point was that, in NYC, once there was adequate policing in terms of staffing, support, and proactive strategies including aggressive investigation and prosecution of criminals and protection for victims and witnesses, good people could then begin to assert themselves, and non-governmental entities (churches, earnest liberal do-gooders) could offer other kinds of assistance, like counseling, legal help, tutoring and so on, and businesses can risk setting up shop, with all the benefits that brings in terms of employment, resources, the end of the famous “food deserts” and so on.
But isn’t the reverse happening? Aren’t the powers that be in the big cities, between outlawing stop and frisk, the Ferguson effect, and moving away from broken windows policing doing what they can to leave all the heavy lifting to the honest citizens who live there?
Don’t we (conservatives) talk a lot about how we have to arm ourselves so that if the authorities won’t keep us safe we will be able to do it for ourselves?
Yes, it is now. Kate and others were talking about what Giuliani managed. Why? Because he understood what was going on and wanted to stop it. Bloomberg and Blasio have been reversing what he did with predictable results.
I’m sure he would be flattered if you did.
Yes and yes. Unfortunately now we have the worst of both approaches — a diminishing police presence AND laws that make it increasingly difficult for good people to legally protect themselves. The #WearOrange campaign is the perfect encapsulation of this counterproductive (and immoral) combination.
I was just at my birthday party (?!) and got into this subject with a friend who brought up “more gun laws” as the way of stopping “gun violence.” I played what has become my trump card. “How are we going to enforce those laws? In particular, how are we going to enforce them, given that illegal gun ownership and “gun violence” are not evenly distributed across the country, but are concentrated in certain areas, including especially the black inner-city?
This turned a mere recitation of liberal panaceas into a real conversation.