GUN CONTROL IS WHITE PRIVILEGE

GUN CONTROL IS WHITE PRIVILEGE

by Thomas Calandra

“There has been a lot of talk said recently, because I supposedly said something about Negros buying rifles. White people have been buying rifles all their lives, no commotion.”

- Malcolm X

"In California 1966, you can carry a loaded gun on the street as long as it is register, not concealed, and not pointed in a threatening manner; you can carry that same gun in your car as long as it is not loaded, not concealed and not pointed in a threatening manner. And of course, as soon as we did that they changed the gun law on us."

- A Huey P. Newton Story

“The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls on the American people in general, and black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless at the very time racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”

- Bobby Seale 1967

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"Let's talk about how gun control banning or restricting firearms is the MOST white privileged idea ever. Rich liberals scoffing at the notion that a person might need to defend their own life is a tower so IVORY you can't look at it in the sunlight. Like saying "just have the maid do it"

 - Unknown

Only a privileged white person would think that the best, safest, and most practical situation for the betterment of all the inhabitants of a society, is for the only people legally allowed to own, handle and operate fully or semi automatic weapons, are Cops.

Only privileged white people, a group of whom have had their rights from the beginning of this country, could have the audacity and the shelter of consequences to tell another group such as black people, (whom have had their rights for only 53 years) that certain rights are “outdated,” “not relevant today,” immoral and ultimately “unnecessary.”

Only white people would have the gall, the sand, and the effrontery to at one moment support Black Lives Matter, then go and scoff, snicker, and sneer at those who wish to not be unarmed against foreboding institutions of state violence or conscious tyranny; calling the fear "unneeded," "unjustified," "unwarranted," and ultimately ignoring or excusing murder.

Only privileged white people think that by simply "doing something" or "to act" will inevitably bring about net positive results. For if they do something in order to decrease gun violence, then by definition it will decrease gun violence; as if it was a law of physics are a mathematical certainty. And by no means is it possible that gun control might have increasingly more harmful unforeseen (actually they are very foreseen) consequences, or in fact, increase gun violence; by no means could reality be an antagonist to their motives, precisely because the motives are their motives. As if it is impossible for it to be raining out as long as they are outside.

THE WAR ON GUNS AND DRUG CONTROL LAWS

In many ways, stating that a current reality is the result of “white privilege” has become the “God works in mysterious ways” of the Left. Both are their respective ideology’s escape hatch from debate that is on the cusp of deflating dogmas that are not only “self-evident” to their worldview, but are those that the beholder was never reasoned into in the first place. However, when it comes to gun control, there is absolutely evidence showing that laws for greater regulation, control or prohibition on firearms, there is a privilege white people have over people of color, just as there is with prohibitions on drugs or any state control on any aspect of private life. However, because guns do have something to do with self-defense, (be it from the state, other people who wish to harm you like criminals, or in warfare against enemy combatants) guns are different. And also because when you compared those who have the forbidden or controlled item or substance, a lot more people have guns than who are the victims of guns than say drugs, like heroin, or methamphetamines. The debate about gun control is a weird absurdity because it quite literally mirrors the same economic factors and political principles as the War on Drugs, yet the position of the Left and the Right are reversed in the case of gun control.

Gun regulations, like all regulations and state-enforced infractions on the populace, hurt the least off first and the most before it slightly hurts the supposed best off, wealthy, or those with the most social credit, if it hurts them at all. Much like a rich person can afford to legally find loopholes in the tax code to then keep a higher percentage of their income, a rich person would have the means to legally find loopholes in whatever gun control or regulations passed by the legislature. Much like a larger giant corporation has the means to pay a regulatory fine to the government, while the smaller business would no doubt go bankrupt from that same fine- a fine issued to an individual for disregarding a regulation on a firearm, a rich person would be able to pay the fine easily, while the poorer person would not, and then might have to go to jail instead. If it is criminal to simply own certain guns -like a semi automatic weapon- who do you think will be able to afford the legal team to get them out of jail time, and who do you think won't be able to and then not only goes to jail, but goes broke and no longer will be able to get a job when they get out, a rich person or a poor person? Who do you think has more money and therefore social and legal shielding to do this? An average white person, or an average black person?

Just to throw the statistics out there for those who need it, the real median household income for whites was $57,000 in 2012, while that same year it was $33,321 for black households. The median black worker earns 75% of that made by the white workers; they had a median hourly wage of $14.92, while the median white worker hourly wage was $19.79.

https://www.epi.org/publication/racial-inequalities-in-wages-income-and-wealth-show-that-mlks-work-remains-unfinished/

Though white people make up 65% of the general United States population, they are only 39% of the prison population, while black people, being only 13% of the general population make up 40% of the prison population. Knowing this fact, what would background checks do the black community compared to the white community? If you outlaw ex-convicts or those who are on probation from owning guns, you are -perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously- essentially trying to disarm black people, especially black males. Now, you either do have faith in the criminal justice system and the corrections system or you don't. Either you claim that the corrections system rehabilitates someone or it doesn't. But you can't say it works and then go and say it didn't. When a person gets out of jail from serving their ordered term, they either have the rights of a free citizen or your system of rehabilitation is broken. You can't say, you have rehabilitated citizens, yet deny them the same rights as those who supposed do not do that which required rehabilitation and then claim your blue ribbon for central planning. That is playing tennis without the net. However, the liberal call for more gun control, and more stringent background checks when attempting to purchase guns, would only further marginalized an already marginalized people, only more so disenfranchise and already disenfranchised people, and only make it so the need for a black person to (now illegally) protect themselves axiomatically makes them into a criminal for simply owning a gun, no matter if they ever used it. And thus increases the likelihood they would go to jail again, and further put themselves into the institutional cascade of impairment to prosperity.

If you believe that prisons are filled with nothing but murderers, rapists, child molesters and adulterers, then I might have some clouds I would be willing to sell you. Most of the people are in prison for non-violent offenses, including drug possession. If you believe that someone that is using marijuana or cocaine is morally equivalent to someone whom has committed a murder or raped a child, then you are a moral relativist, and by definition are in no position to make moral claims or dictates on other people. By criminalizing the mere ownership of something that wasn't criminalized before, you are putting more non-violent people in jail and therefore costing more tax dollars in the for of housing people in jail. Who are the people going to be in jail for simply possessing a gun? When caught with some amount of illegal drugs, who is more likely to get off and not go to jail or pay a fine, a white person or a black person? Even if both get charged, who is likely to have a lesser prison sentence, a white person or a black person? If it is to pay a fine or go to jail for breaking some new administered gun law, who is more likely to be able to pay the fine and avoid jail, and who is more likely to not be able to pay the fine, thus having to go to jail, a white person or a black person? Who does drug laws hurt more, white people or black people? What makes you think it will be any different with gun laws? What makes guns laws impermeable to the economic laws which systematically throw black men and women in jail and force them to live in living situation privilege white liberal gun-control advocates can’t even image?

There is nothing different between guns and drugs when it comes to disproportionately hurting black communities after prohibitions against the substances or firearms have been initiated and enforced. Gun Control Liberals essentialize guns much like Law and Order conservatives essentialize drugs. The latter thinks there is some evil soul to drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin, while drugs like alcohol and nicotine are just mild excesses that need a slight looking-after; even though nicotine and alcohol kill more people each year than marijuana, cocaine, and heroin collectively will in a decade. The gun control liberal does this with assault rifles and handguns, while hunting rifles and even shotguns are there and need slight overseeing. Now in truth, it is the handgun that is the cause of most gun homicides in the United States, but that matters little. In truth, the War on Drugs, and the War on Guns were and are cultural and political battles just as much as the are supposed bandaging of an open wound. The War on Drugs was a response to both an actually increasing in crime that was happening and a cultural change involving a highly informal generation filled with ideas of free love, free drugs, long hair, anti-hierarchical, anti war, anti-capitalism, anti commerce sentiments. However, once drug laws were implemented and as time went on, black communities became more of the victim as oppose to the hippies, (whom either just went on to teaching at universities, or became the corporate elite that tried to capitalize and hippyism in the 1990’s by trying to selling us a plastic Volkswagen Beetle) and the conservatives didn't mind so much. In fact, then doubling down and creating mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession laws first with New York State in 1973 and the rest of the country in 1986. Similarly, the War on Guns is a political and cultural blow, not to the Republicans that disagree with them, but implicitly to the South, and the culture of the supposed Southern “white trash” or “Redneck,” whose way of life the northern liberal finds as disdainful – with the dialect, and ignorance, and the music—as the conservative does with those in poor urban communities. Yet, much like the conservatives attempt to legislatively kill off the counter-culture of the far-left Soixante-Huitard just ended up bulldozing black communities and the lives of the families within, so will the liberal attempt to legislatively kill off Southern white Redneck Gun loving Honor culture, just end up just too destroying the lives of the black people.

The Nobel Prize winning libertarian Economist Milton Friedman once said, “If you look at the Drug War from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” What he meant, and adopting it for our discussion, was that gun laws, like drug laws, widen the gap between the have and the have nots. Drug laws are corporate welfare (the corporations here are drug cartels) paid for by the poor people to whom drugs affect the most negatively. Much like minimum wage laws, which help big businesses (whom can afford the compulsory uptick in wages) weed out smaller competition, (whom can't) drug laws help big cartel weed out smaller drug dealers and lesser competition, because cartels can circumvent, manipulate, and avoid the law much easier than smaller drug operations; and thus creates corruption and crime that would not be there if the laws never existed. In other words, the rich ones get richer and the poor ones go to jail.

It has become a platitude in the debate for gun control that new gun laws create criminals out of those who were not before with simple stroke of a pen. However banal, this is still true, just as a law passed tomorrow prohibiting the ownership of decaffeinated coffee, would too create criminals out of those who otherwise were model citizens. Guns however, like drugs and decaffeinated coffee, will still be in the hands of those who can afford to pay the now higher cost of being a legal criminal. And by criminal we mean someone who simply owns a thing, instead of the appropriate definition of criminal, which is someone who does violent acts and creates victims from such actions. Returning to the drug comparison, we see a moral and crimina distinction between a drug dealer (who does an action) and someone in mere posession of a drug (who is a criminal simply for posessing a thing). No one suffers from simply owning something, be it a plant, a clock, or a gun. However, by controlling, regulating, or outlawing the mere ownership of a thing, one institutes an apparatus of marginalization of those who can pay the newly expensive price for the product, (which is in gross demand or else there would be no need to create laws) and those who can't. Although, now they have an incentive to get skin in the game, because the price of the forbidden product induces those who have nothing to lose (economically) to become one player in the new prohibited industry, which was only created by the law in the first place. If one has a gun that via law becomes illegal to own, that person not only is now automatically a criminal, but that person is now extremely wealthier, because the price of that gun just went up. Illegal items, such as drugs and now guns, become of interest to black market venture capitalists. It attracts those who have money to make more money. By creating prohibitions against guns or drugs, clocks or decaf coffee, you are helping to accentuate the divide between the burdened and un-incumbered. And between black people and white people in America, whom do you think is the burdened and whom do you think is the un-incumbered?

"It is no trick to make a lot of money...if all you want to do is make a lot of money." - Mr. Bernstein in 'Citizen Kane'

Greed is a human universal, and you won't earn one a dime simply by being greedy; you have to do something about it. Some people create things and put them up for sale in the marketplace and hope people want them. Others find ways to get to a position of power in order to make laws on all people but end up only helping their own personal finances. However, when it comes to those who will do anything to make money -no matter how illegal or how difficult it is to buy legitimacy- those with money or the social shield will inevitably have a leg up in the new industry that was created by the good intentions of the ones calling for the prohibition. Gun cartels will be built because of the "need" for gun control. And these gun cartels will be shielded from economic destruction by the new laws that protect them from competition and the very laws that were meant to end them. White people will be more so able to buy their way out of legal repercussions, while black people will most likely not be able to. Black people will go to prison more than white people for doing the same anti-gun crime, just as they are more likely to go to prison for comitting the same drug offense, or any criminal action. Black people will not be able to afford the fines like white white people do. Black people will not be able to afford the same legal defense as white people are able to afford today for drug offenses. Anti-gun laws will do the same to black communities that anti-drug laws do. Do anti-drug laws do the same to white communities as they do to black communities? No. Again I ask, do you think anti-gun laws will be any different?

THE LICENSING SOLUTION IS ANTI-BLACK
Many gun control advocates would like to see gun regulation somehow mimic the regulations bestowed on driving a car, with a heavily broadcasted one being the call for gun licenses. "You need a license to drive a car, why not require a license to buy a gun?" And of course when pressed, the licensing process would be similar to that of driving, in where one takes a written test, a training course and an administered test, much like the test for a learner's permit, five-hour coarse, and road test. The problem is that licensing for guns, much like the licensing for driving, hurts minorities in a variety of different ways, with black people getting gutted by both sides of the double edge sword.

The first problem can be easily seen. People with money and with cushy jobs have the ability to take time off of work to afford the cost and time it would take to get a gun license. Depending on the state, there is an application fee to just get your learner's permit, then there is a fee to take your driver’s course, then there is a fee to take your road test and acquire your physical license. How much are each of these steps going to be when it comes to gun licensing? More or less than driving? If it is regulated by the states then we can be sure that each step in the conservative states would be inexpensive and the liberal states would be expensive. How long is the training course going to be with guns? 5 hours? 5 days? 5 weeks? Again here one would that think the conservative states would be much shorter than the more liberal states. Yet, the longer the course is, the more one will have to pay the trainers. The more one has to pay the trainers, the more the course will cost to those who wish to get the license. The more the course will cost, the less likely poor people will be able to afford it. Only those with that large amount of money can afford to have a gun. Recall the stats above on black and white disparities regarding income; Who is more likely to have this time and money to attain a gun license, white people or black people? And even if a black person has the money to afford the cost of a gun license, do you think they are less likely or more likely to have a job that will allow them to take the time off in order to get a license?

Of course, guns are to the liberal, as crime is to the conservative. No conservative wants to be seen as soft on crime to other conservatives, and no liberal wants to be seen as soft on guns to other liberals. So gun control advocates setting up the licensing laws will want the fees to be ever so higher, and the training courses ever so longer, to not only make it more and more difficult to get a gun, but to virtue signal to other co-thinkers that they are the most serious about "fixing" the "problem." This, of course, just widens the gap between both the rich and the poor, but instead of just money and power, it is literally with weapons. In a sweet irony, with the liberal states having systems of gun licensing both harder to complete and more costly upfront, the pro civil rights, Black Lives Matter supporting progressive, armed with their good intentions, is hurting the black communities in their districts in the manner of gun restriction, more so that that of their counter parts in the southern bible belt states, whom in the past have had a literal apartheid. Perhaps this time around the New New Jim Crow laws are those involving guns and are enforced by northern liberals.

The second problem is that driver's licenses are mistakenly seen as a badge of responsibility for things that have nothing to do with driving or cars. Employers constantly claim that applicants with a valid driver's license are more likely to be hired, because one is automatically seen as more responsible if they are licensed; even if the job requires no driving whatsoever. Minorities are more likely to no have a license than whites. Why this is is because of a number of reasons: minorities are more likely to live in cities where public transportation is more available, they are more likely to not be able to afford to get a car thus making a license unnecessary, they are more likely not be able to afford to pay traffic violations thus getting their license suspended, and because they have a higher incarceration rate, they are more likely to not be allowed to get a driver's license. And because of this, minorities are less likely to be hired for jobs. Not because of conscious or unconscious racism -the employer can be a minority as well- but because of a bias against those who do not have a driver's license. As if there never has been an irresponsible driver.

Will licenses for guns be the same? If two applicants for a job are equally qualified except one has a gun license, is the one with the license seemingly more responsible, thus making them appear to be more qualified for the job? If so, then minorities would be at a disadvantage, just as they are because of driver's license. Would employers be allowed to discriminate against those with gun licenses? For example, could a business not hire someone on the grounds that they legally own a gun? Are those with a gun license going to be seen as innately more violent, much like those without a driver's license seen as somehow less responsible? One could possibly see perhaps that liberal firms might see those with gun licenses as potentially violent, and conservative owned firms might see them as more responsible. However, it could be seen by certain firms that minorities with a license are seen as prone to being violent, while with whites it could be a signifier of responsibility. If this is the case then it will discourage minorities from getting gun licenses even if they can, and stimulate whites to getting them in order to get a leg up. Either way, it disarms minorities and hurts their chances of employment and economic mobility.

THE COP PROBLEM WHITES DON’T HAVE

“I have called for rifle clubs. I think Negroes in areas where police, whether it be federal, state or city, have proven their inability or unwillingness to defend Negroes – the lives and the property of Negroes – that it is only intelligent and it is only right that Negroes protect themselves...so that any time that anyone makes any effort whatsoever to brutalize them, or attack them, or endanger them, they should have something to defend themselves.”

- Malcolm X

Malcolm X did not think these clubs should be those of handguns or automatic machine guns, nor did he advocate for anything illegal. However, Malcolm X didn’t live in today’s world where the police have literal military armories back at their police headquarters, each bought at a discount price from the United States Defense Department, which includes not just machine guns that renders the feared AR-15 impotent, but tanks, real honest to God tanks. Therefore, if you fail to begin your arguments for gun control with the immediate discussion of disarming or least regulating the guns of the police, then you are at best not a serious person for whom we should all ignore, or else a statist whose position is "your guns need to be regulated, controlled, or confiscated for fear that you might use them in an unlawfully deadly manner, but not the guns of Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, Kenneth Boss, Paul Headley, Michael Carey, Marc Cooper, Gescard Isnora, Michael Olive, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, Rolando Solano, Darren Wilson, and Daniel Holtzclaw." All those officers passed tests. All those officers were licensed. All those officers had training. All those officers had registered firearms. And all those officers and many more have destroyed communities of color. One of the flaws in the thought patterns of the gun control advocate, when it comes to demanding a regulatory apparatus for guns that involves training seminars, written and practical tests, health requirements, and registration and insurance of the firearm, is that this solution is on par with what police officers have to go through before taking the job; yet, there is a major problem with police brutality in the United States, which involves the shooting of unarmed citizens.

For the exceptions of shutting down one’s frat party, or asking the band playing at your back yard barbecue to turn down the volume, white people do not have to worry about the police, and especially not as a violent threat on a daily basis. White people never have to consider that a person may have to defend themselves against a cop.

Malcolm X once said:

“I don’t believe that when a man has been criminally treated, the criminal has a right to tell that man what tactics to use to get the criminal has a right to tell that man what tactics to use to get the criminal off his back. When a criminal starts misusing me, I am going to use whatever necessary to get that criminal off my back. And the injustice that has been inflicted upon Negros in this country by uncle Sam is criminal. Don t blame a cracker in Georgia for your injustice, the government is responsible for the injustices.”

Since 2013, there has been around 900,000 to 1.1 million active police officers on duty in the United States. In the same time, the police were involved in unjustified homicides of civilians ranging from 1,100 to 1,400 annually. Which puts the unjustified homicide rate for the police at 120 per 100,000 population. Recall that the homicide rate for the general population of the United States is 4.9 per 100,000. Why then propose gun control regulations that produce only a group of individuals whose murder rate is higher than the most dangerous country in the world to live in: Honduras? A nation that has a homicide rate of 90.4 per 100,000 population. People of color are hit harder by the police than whites whom were killed at the hands of the police at a rate of 2.9 per one million, while black people were killed at a rate of 7.2 per one million. Only a white person would think that the best solution to halt the needless slaughter of innocent lives from mass shootings, is for the only group of people that should be allowed to have guns are cops. Or somehow think that for those to have a gun, one would have to pass the same testing as that of a police force.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/police-killings-hit-people-color-hardest-study-finds-n872086

This isn’t a call to arm oneself with the objective of offensive attacks on police officers, but to be there as a line of defense and action against those who have the power to hurt people with impunity which no doubt, police officers have. Sherwin Forte, brother of a Black Panther member spoke of when the police stopped a black man, or was arresting a black person in their community and how his fellow community members surrounded the scene from a reasonable and legal distance but with rifles and shotguns to make sure that the arrest went according to the law and without violence; “No one would do anything until the officer injects around into the chamber. Then we would all inject rounds into the chamber. Then all up and down the street you heard this ‘clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.’” This may seem like an insane scenario to you, one that may simply escalate the situation to greater violence that necessary. If you believe this, one could bet all the money in their pockets that you are a white person that doesn't see cops as an immediate violent threat, much like one does a charging bull. And therefore perhaps you are not in the position to decide and make laws based on how much violence in the black community is necessary.

THE ARMED GUARD SOLUTION IS ALSO ANTI-BLACK

“These laws are going to hurt us worse and going to affect us first. If you put more police in schools, you are going to see more police engaging African-American children in a violent manner. The same way the little girl was slammed on her desk, the same way the little girl was slammed at a pool party. Laws that are introduced are going to affect my community first.”

- Killer Mike

Usually in response to liberal calls for gun control after a tragic shooting or massacre of many people there is a conservative rebuttal of calling for an “armed guard” or “man with a gun” to take out the shooter when they emerge from their sick abyss. This is an absurd solution, not because of the equally absurd liberal counter to it of “’More guns’ isn’t the answer,” but because the mass shootings in schools, places of worship, or concerts are so rare, so minuscule, so infinitesimal, that mandating armed guards be placed in each institution is so astronomically inefficient and a misallocation of money and resources, the only comparison one could make is that it would be like deputizing the ocean in order to lick a stamp.

In the United States, there are 11,000 people who die each year from homicides involving guns. However, most of them die from a handgun and are killed with a purpose of just killing them, as oppose to a mass killing of individuals by a person with a machine gun that has an objective of either murdering those belonging to a particular group or deliberately at random. In fact, less than one percent will die in that manner. And yet, that is just a small percentage of the small number who die from gun violence. More people will die of heart disease this year than half a century worth of gun homicides. But most people wont die at all. Most people live and go about their day only hearing of tragedies somewhere else. And by most Americans one means 99.999999% of them.

If a law is passed mandating that an armed guard be placed in every school, or an armed guard stationed based on the school’s population, then schools in poor districts, which have a higher percentage of being schools in black communities with higher percentages of black students, are going to be hurt more so than wealthier schools whom both are more likely to be able to afford the arm guards and ironically, also more likely not not need them.

Schools with poorer communities that are mostly consisted of Black residents cannot afford more armed guards. If armed guard policies are state-mandated, they will have to move money from some other programs in order to pay, or raise school taxes on already poor communities. If funds are being provided by the government for the armed guards then this means that, yes, the poor black communities school will have an armed guard, but the more well-off school—who can already afford the guard and is in communities that are more likely not in need of one—the armed guard subsidy given by the government can be used for other school programs by the wealthier white schools, thus increasing the inequality between the two schools.

Though police officers in predominately white middle class public schools may relax the worries of white middle class parents, the same is not the case for black parents of black children of frankly any class. The odds of a shooting happening in any school is extremely low. The odds of police engaging students in a violent manner is much higher. This isn't to say the students are angels. No students are. Yet, there is a certain percentage of engagements by police on students that will be considered unwarranted, or unnecessary, or an overreaction. This percentage would be true even for wealthier white schools. However there is no question that this percentage would higher for black students in black communities because it is true for the regular police in general for black communities. And this is more likely the more officers are there on campus, and is more likely to happen in a school than in the general public, because the cop at the school has nothing else to do but to engage into the activities of children. This is even the case for security guards who are black as the recent incident involving the police shooting of Jemel Roberson, (a security guard for a night club) has proven. Roberson apprehend a man for setting a fire he had the man in the parking lot when police arrived they shot Roberson. This happened in very gun controlled Illinois, outside of Chicago which itself has tight gun control. This is a single example but it stands to be true that black man with a gun is more likely to be shot on site than a white security guard in the same position. Not to say this situation would never happen to a white security guard, just like there are very poor, disadvantage white people. This is just to say that it is more likely black children that will be harmed by an armed guard or police officer stationed there without reason, just as universal x-for-all programs disproportionately don't benefit the poor, (who are disproportionately black) because the programs pour tax payer money into wealthier communities that could already on their own afford the program; whom of which are disproportionately not black.

THE PERFECT ENGINE FOR RACIAL DISPARITY

Black people are disproportionately poor, disproportionately imprisoned, disproportionately given the death penalty, disproportionately unemployed, disproportionately denial loans, disproportionately stopped, harassed and killed by the police, and disproportionately the victim of homicide, which is the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 18 and 35. When adjusting to general demographics, the biggest victim of gun violence in America are black people with 50% of the victims being black. Of course, it is very well known that someone is much more likely to be murdered, raped, kidnapped or assaulted by someone that they know very well, or acquaintance, than by a stranger. Therefore, it is also true that the perpetrator of gun violence against black people are other black people, just as it is true that the largest group most victimized and suffer as a result of Islamic terrorism is other Muslims. There are Umberto Eco-size libraries worth of books with theories on why the black population in America has a higher rate of crime and violence than any other group, just as there are numerous reasons for all the disparities mentioned and even more numerous solutions for them with most involving remaking society from the ground up as well as the top down; a task this is horrendously improbable, and no doubt time consuming if it wasn't by definition impossible, unless we have a Leviathan-state disregard the rights, will, and even consciousness of individuals in order to do so; all the while hoping for those at the helm of the Hobbsian monolith to have the omniscience of the God that isn't there.

Yet, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that certain crimes that the black population seem to be at a lower incidence than whites, (such as rape, aggravated assault, domestic violence, and forms of property crimes) are actually just as prevalent—if not more prevalent—because of lower number of avenues the black community have to get help, (especially when it comes to black women when victims of rape and domestic violence) as well as a very understandable reluctance to go to the police. For our discussion, what matters is not the understanding of why it is true, but all that matters is the understanding that it is true.

Footnote: The long term data can be viewed by going to the Bureau of Justice statistics’ website and reading their report Homicide Trends in the United States: 1980-2008. The more up to date statistics are linked in the sources. Not only does the data validate the premise, but it will show that black on black violence has decreased greater over time than has that of other groups. Thus adding to the thesis of vast improvements have occurred in the United States when it comes to stifling human suffering.

Gun control laws, however, only exacerbate these disparities, and will do so the more that are implemented. Drug addiction is a problem that we would like to solve or at least mitigate as much as possible. Have drug laws helped? No. Has it seemed to create more drug addiction? Perhaps. Has drug laws disproportionately hurt black people? Yes. Is racism and discrimination a problem? Yes. Will it be solve by the passing of any law? No. Will it get better over time from a cosmos of social, political and economic factors? The evidence suggests yes. Will gun control whose laws almost mirror that of drug control laws negatively affect black people? Yes, because the black market created by the ban will make guns unaffordable to the most poor, because it will create more cartels for the selling and producing of illegal guns, (which as drug cartels do), which will hurt black people more, and the licensing of guns filters out black people for protecting themselves against problems white gun control advocates only believed happened in episodes of The Wire.

 It is dangerous to create mass panic about a crisis that doesn't exist because making social decisions out of fear is dangerous. Just as it is dangerous to tell the public that a caravan of people coming to the US is filled with terrorists, drug dealers, rapists and those who call soccer "football", (because it causes a need for thousands of military personnel to be sent to the border instead of places they could be more effective, and creates an irrational demand for a wall to keep them out, both are a huge strain of resources the government could use for other social programs) so is it dangerous to tell the incorrect fact that there is a growing epidemic of gun violence to where at any moment any citizen, with an emphasis on children (because parents are known for their rational thinking when it comes to calculating risk) can be a victim of a mass shooter, because first,(in the case of the conservative arm guard solution) it puts resources to use where they don't need to be and therefore a strain schools, or other institutions (especially of poor communities) of money they could use elsewhere for programs that are of greater benefit, and second (in the case of the liberal "more laws, background checks, regulations" solution) disproportionately affects, hurts and punishes minorities, (especially black people) like all laws do, because gun control like drug control creates an almost police protection for those who have the illegal item but are wealthy, have social privilege, and those with no prior offenses, while systematically throws in jail those who have none of those things. Or, as I would conclude, a perfect engine for making sure the only people with guns are white people and cops. 

And sure one could suggest that my arguments here are based on the economic disparity between black people and white people, as well as the racial disparity and unjust outcomes in our criminal justice system, and if we were to correct them as a society, my argument that gun control in all of its forms would no longer would be valid. I agree, but until then, my argument stands, and pass gun control measures without those social corrections only throw water on a grease fire, no matter how hard you convince people that the water has been filtered and purified.

“Before you give all of your rights up, use them all.” - Killer Mike