Black women and scared whites have much to discuss about mass shootings
HOW much of a factor is race un the US gun debate? The Washington Post trolls the nation with an article entitled:
White men have much to discuss about mass shootings
Charlotte Childress and Harriet Childress write:
Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.” Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.
But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room.
This leads to a serous of rhetorical questions:
Why are so many white men and boys producing and entertaining themselves with violent video games and other media?
Why do white men buy, sell and manufacture guns for profit; attend gun shows; and demonstrate for unrestricted gun access disproportionately more than people of other ethnicities or races?
Why are white male congressmen leading the fight against gun control?
If Americans ask the right questions on gun issues, we will get the right answers.
The right question might be why is that so many more blacks die from gun shots than whites?
A 2010 study by researchers a Colombia University declared:
African-Americans are six times as likely as white Americans to die at the hands of a murderer, and roughly seven times as likely to murder someone… Young black men are fifteen times as likely to be murdered as young white men.
The conclusion was interesting:
The key idea explored in this paper is that murder can be a preemptive act that is driven by the fear of being killed. When the subjective costs of killing are unobservable at the individual level, racial stereotypes can ináuence behavior in such a manner as to cause systematic variations in murder rates across di§erent types of dyadic interaction. Individuals belonging to groups perceived to have low marginal penalties for killing will be feared, and they will accordingly also be killed with greater frequency. By the same token, individuals whose own deaths are less likely to be investigated and
prosecuted vigorously will fear being killed, and may therefore be induced to kill preemptively. This means that social groups with high victimization rates will also have high murder rates, even if there is no racial segregation in social interactions…
Howard Nemerov has more:
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence claims it “fights for sensible gun laws to protect you, your family and your community.” Since 2001, they’ve published annual report cards rating each state on how many gun-control laws they have. States graded “A” enacted most of Brady’s “sensible” laws; states graded “F” enacted the fewest.
“Gun violence” is a crafted phrase to induce people into associating guns with violence. Using Ezra Klein’s logic, Brady’s “A”-graded, low-gun states should be the safest. But when collated with CDC firearms murder rates, an inconvenient correlation appears: more gun control, higher black homicide, lower Caucasian homicide.
One of the unpleasant realizations from my original research was my learning that the history of American gun control is that of racist oppression: banning sales to Indians in order to maintain dominance while grabbing land; ensuring free blacks remained as close to slaves as possible; disarming the Japanese before their internment during World War II.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 31st, March 2013 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
