In the two months since Newtown, there have been more than 1,700 gun deaths in America. By contrast, eight Americans have died in Afghanistan in that same period.
There’s no other way to say it: The number of domestic deaths attributable to guns in this country is beyond awful, outrageous, obscene and tragic. It’s simply unworthy of a civilized society. In the aftermath of the December slaughter in Newtown and more murders in Chicago, we’ve been bludgeoned by reminders of ever-alarming numbers and hauntingly familiar patterns.
President Barack Obama and others have been trying to channel grief and anger into meaningful action. As a strategy, it helps to appeal to as large an activist constituency as possible. But in the process of rallying support for common-sense gun laws–from background checks to assault-weapon bans–there is a level of conflation going on.
On the one hand, we have mass murders–from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Tucson to Aurora to Newtown–which are extensions of issues ranging from mental health treatment, violent pop culture and Second Amendment perversion to legal access to assault weapons and high-cap magazines. We know what to target, but the political will remains disgracefully problematic.
On the other hand, we have an explosion of what has long been a festering, urban, largely black-on-black, deadly crime pathology. Nearly 7,000 blacks are killed annually in this country, more than 90 percent by other blacks, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is not a Second Amendment issue. This is a violent teenage-gang issue. This is a dysfunctional, inner-city, black-culture issue.
And while this may be sounding like a rant, it’s not racist. It’s realist. Let me quote another local columnist, the eminent societal chronicler at the Tampa Bay Times, Bill Maxwell.
“Many African-Americans blame urban poverty for this crisis,” recently noted Maxwell who’s African-American. “But poverty does not explain away the lack of a moral compass, the source of the violence and general neglect that have turned our communities into dystopias.”
Gun violence in the U.S. is a two-track scourge. It will require leadership in Congress, in statehouses, in municipalities, in individual communities and in families.
If we are better than this, it’s past time we acted like it.