The Constitution, Read It.
For reference, the text of the Second Amendment to the Constitution: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
For additional reference, selected text of the Fourteenth Amendment: No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Math is Hard. Your Brain is Out to Trick You.
Before reading more, go check out the data on annual gun related deaths for yourself on the blog FiveThirtyEight.
I like statistics. While reading the stats, keep in mind that understanding the data can be complicated. There are a lot of numbers and that can be frazzling, people don’t love math, sadly. Don’t get frazzled. There are big numbers and sometimes big numbers can desensitize what we’re talking about. Don’t get desensitized. Real people are dying.
Big numbers can also skew your understanding. For example: if I told you that 50 girls name Suzy and 50 girls named Brittany were suspended from high school in the US last year, you might see that and say ‘there is an equal chance of a girl named Suzy to be suspended than a girl named Brittany.’ And that might otherwise be rational, unless I told you that in the US there are 100,000 high school aged girls named Suzy, but only 10,000 name Brittany. That changes the game! Now the correlation to be seen is that girls named Brittany are 10 times more likely than girls named Suzy to be suspended from high school. (Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, see Freakonomics).
My point is that often times the rate or percentage, is much more interesting – or telling – than the gross number.
Whites Kill Themselves, Blacks Get Killed
Two glaring disproportions from the article:
The annual death rate of black people killed by guns for any reason (20 per 100,000 – remember, look to the rate) is the largest of any specific race (almost double the rate of white deaths 11.2 per 100,000), largely due to homicide.
The percentage of white people using guns to commit suicide is nearly 90% of all white gun deaths, and represents almost half(!) of the total gun related deaths per year (while that is stunning, it is still only 9.4 per 100,000 white people – don’t be seduced).
Whose Lives Matter?
All Lives Matter? Look at the total number of gun deaths in this country over the total population. The rate of all gun deaths in a given year is 10.6 per 100,000 people.
Compare that number to the 20 per 100,000 black people killed by guns and you see that Black Lives are almost 2 TIMES AS LIKELY to be killed by a gun than All Lives.
Blue Lives Matter? The FiveThirtyEight blog doesn’t include a “police-as-a-race” category, so we have to look elsewhere to compare number of police killed by guns over total police. In 2014, the number of law enforcement officers feloniously killed by firearms is 48, which includes accidents (as a quick aside, I think we can all agree that number should always be “0”, so please don’t confuse this as an anti-police article, it surely is not that). For population perspective, in 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of sworn law enforcement officers in the US at the state and local level was 765,000 (note, this does not include federal, meaning there are many more sworn law enforcement officers in this country than that). So, for simplicity, let’s just assume the total number of law enforcement officers in 2008 is essentially the same in 2014. And we’ll continue to exclude federal officers in the denominator, even though federal law enforcement is not excluded in the 48 firearm deaths number – the numerator. This leads us to a hugely overestimated percentage of sworn law enforcement officers killed by firearms at approximately 6.67 per 100,000 sworn law enforcement officers.
Again, compare that number to the 20 per 100,000 black people killed by guns and you quickly see that a black person is 3 TIMES AS LIKELY to be killed by a gun in this country in a given year than a police officer is to be feloniously killed in the line of duty.
AllLivesMatter and BlueLivesMatter miss the point for many reasons. The biggest reason is that almost nobody throughout the history of this country has ever thought that All Lives or Blue Lives don’t matter. Of course they matter. On the contrary, Black people were literally treated as 3/5 of a person for generations in this country, they were property not people. Their lives were quantifiably worth less in the eyes of the law and our citizens! The Civil Rights Act was only enacted in 1964! So, forgive them if they feel like their lives don’t matter as much as the general population and cops. Because, historical facts and present statistics declare unequivocally that they are correct.
Guns Are A Race Issue
Draw your own conclusions as to causation all you want to, but the data are clear, guns DISPROPORTIONATELY hurt our black friends and neighbors. This is unacceptable. We must stop being defensive when our black friends cry foul. The foul is clear. Our present rules on guns are allowing these guns (registered or not) to massacre our black neighbors and friends at an astonishing and disproportional rate. This must change. But the Second Amendment, you say!? I say to you, the Fourteenth Amendment (and Fifth Amendment, relax legal scholars) Equal Protection!! They’re both in there.
So. If we are going to hold so fast and unmoving to our Second Amendment and allow people-with-guns to kill 33,000 of our citizens each year, then we must insist, at the very least, that people-with-guns do so equally.
Gun control is a race issue. #blacklivesmatter
*all the data I use is from the FiveThirtyEight article linked above, which includes the FBI’s count of Law Enforcement Officers Feloniously Killed, and also the data from the Census of State and Local Law Enforcement published by the Bureau of Crime Statistics in 2011. This is not meant to be a data journalism piece.
**I attempted to not draw any causal conclusions because we can argue all day about why each specific gun shot killed each beloved person, and what rules and regulations may have helped prevent such senselessness. I am not interested in arguing in a blame-game manner, that’s not super helpful. I am way more interested – insistent, really – that we simply agree on the obvious facts, and take real steps towards fixing the obvious problem. It’s no good to say, “why is this happening, it can’t possibly be my fault, I’m not racist.” Rather we must say, “this is an unimaginable tragedy, what are some changes I can make in my life and work that will help solve the problem, regardless if I’m at fault or not, because maybe I am at fault in some way even if I don’t mean to be..”