The unbearable whiteness of the gun debate
The question, at first, is shocking, invoking race when race does not seem germane. “What if,” a counter-factual, “it was African Americans…
The question, at first, is shocking, invoking race when race does not seem germane. “What if,” a counter-factual, “it was African Americans pressing for expanded gun rights, defending the Second Amendment in terms often used by the white supporters of gun rights?” What if — an unanswerable question, perhaps, but one I assume the pro-gun side would likely answer with a theoretical “why should it matter?”
History tells us it does. Rewind to 1967. The Black Panther Party has launched in Oakland, “operating what it called Black Panther Police Patrol.” As Charles P. Pierce wrote in Esquire, party members “would listen to police scanners and then hustle to the scene of an arrest, where they would remind the suspect of his legal rights. They also showed up armed, because California then was an open-carry state because, of course, freedom.” The Panthers made clear that the weapons — hand guns, rifles — were for defensive purposes. They intended to protect themselves and the rest of the black community from the police, which had been involved in several high-profile incidents of brutality and were seen as the enemy in many neighborhoods.
In response, California Republicans — including conservative saint Ronald Reagan, then governor — pushed through legislation banning the open carry of loaded weapons in the state. As the debate unfolded, Pierce writes, the Panthers “show(ed) up at the state capitol in Sacramento while exercising their god-given right to bear arms,” which scarred the hell “out of white people.” The law passed, of course, with support from the NRA, the notion of armed and militant blacks being enough for white conservatives to restrict what the NRA now calls “our first freedom.”
The irony, of course, is that the Panthers’ rationale — self and community protection, the Second Amendment — is the same argument now being put forth by a more radical and rabidly pro-gun NRA. But the Panthers, because of their race and rhetoric of empowerment, were a threat that had to be neutralized.
Today, we face a different, but related issue. The current heightened activism on the gun control side is due in no small part to the identities of the victims. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Florida school where Nikolas Cruz kill 17 students and staff, is 61 percent white, 18 percent Hispanic and 11 percent African American, which is significantly whiter and less Hispanic than the population of public school students nationally. Douglas is also richer — 21 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch as compared with 48 percent nationally and 56 percent for the state of Florida as a whole.
None of this should matter to the debate, especially with gun deaths declining overall. But mass shootings appear to be on the increase and they leave a psychological toll on the public imagination. They represent a relatively small subset of gun crimes, but motivate the political world in a way the broader problem of gun proliferation — the sheer, unfathomable number of guns of all kind in circulation — just doesn’t.
The question is why. One answer is that dead kids, and this is going to sound unduly crass, strike a nerve like little else. Kids are innocent, deserve protection — which hints at the second answer, one that’s never far from the surface when discussing politics in the United States: race. The face of gun death in the United States has for decades been African American and Latino youth. African Americans are twice as likely to be killed by a gun as whites, with most gun homicides taking place in major cities. (Most gun deaths — nearly two thirds — are suicides.)
Data like this is often met with a shrug — or it is used by politicians like a Donald Trump and Bill Clinton as part of a tough-on-crime argument in favor of harsher sentences and stop-and-frisk policies. The goal is the confiscation of illegal guns — which ignores that every gun starts out as legal and only ends up on the black market after its initial purchase, off in a state with lax gun laws.
Or the data is used to sensationalize the debate, allegedly providing statistical proof for the false (and thinly veiled racist) claims about urban hell scapes overrun by gangs, about the “scourge” of “black on black crime” that gets brought up to deflect from other, more uncomfortable issues. Gun proliferation in the city, therefore, becomes an excuse to arm the suburbs, or to “unshackle” law enforcement and rarely results in the proper question being asked.
The kids in Florida are right to be angry. They are right to take their concerns to Tallahassee and Washington. But their concerns are not the only concerns, and mass shootings are not the only gun crisis facing the nation.
The attention they’re getting is legitimate, but it’s also born of their privilege. No one mentions race explicitly, but it’s there, close to the surface, and it distorts the debate.