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America has a gun violence problem. No sh*t, right? But what’s much worse and potentially more dangerous is that we have a problem with properly categorizing it, identifying the various underlying causes of it, and ultimately taking legislative action to address it. The way most Americans view gun violence and the way our government responds to it is best illustrated by a pair of shooting incidents nearly seven years ago under completely different circumstances both garnered national attention within a month of each other.
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old white man, shot and killed his mother before driving to Sandy Hook Elementary school and killing 20 young children along with six adult staff members. Then-President Barack Obama, fresh off his re-election less than a month earlier, nearly teared up as he addressed the nation following the day’s events.
This is the type of gun violence that dominates national headlines in American media — a mass shooting involving mainly unarmed innocent victims in places not ordinarily known for gun violence.
The shooting at Sandy Hook, the only shooting in recent memory to involve so many children (mostly between the ages of six and seven), relit the national debate over gun control and in response, senate Democrats swiftly introduced the Assault Weapons Ban Bill a little more than a month later on January 24th. The bill was ultimately defeated in the senate 60-40 later that year.
Just a few days prior on January 20th, Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old black girl from Chicago, performed as a majorette at President Obama’s second inaugural parade in Washington D.C. alongside her King College Prep classmates. She wasn’t nationally known on that day, but after January 29th her name became synonymous with urban gun violence after she was shot and killed standing outside at a neighborhood park.
Hadiya’s murder came on the heels of 2012 when Chicago’s murderous summer weekends made national headlines and catapulted the city to nation’s murder capital with more than 500 homicides. In addition, the city recorded roughly 1,800 shooting incidents over the course of the year with the overwhelming majority being committed by and against African-Americans with handguns
Under normal circumstances, a Black girl being killed by gunfire in a Black neighborhood wouldn’t crack the slowest of national news cycles. But Hadiya having performed at the presidential inauguration just days before her death, combined with the nation’s overall heightened awareness concerning gun violence at the time, catapulted her story into the spotlight. Michele Obama attended Hadiya’s funeral and her parents attended the State of the Union Address as guests of the First Lady.
Despite the added newsworthiness of Hadiya's story, and the overwhelming statistical evidence that gun violence is just as much if not more of an issue in urban America, there was no national discussion of the causes of violence in these communities.
Perhaps recognizing the disparity in coverage received by incidents like Hadiya’s, President Obama planned to deliver a speech dedicated to gun violence live from Chicago. Leading up to the speech, Michael P. Jeffries, in an article published by The Atlantic on February 15, 2013 entitled “Obama’s Speech Can’t Address Gun Violence Unless It Takes On Race” spoke directly to what separates urban gun violence from the mass shootings.
He wrote:
“There is a belief — usually implicit and unspoken — in the response to mass shootings involving white victims, an idea that they are more worthy of mourning, national outrage, and legislative action. The tragedies in Aurora, Newtown, and other white neighborhoods were earth-shattering. But gun violence claims scores of no-less-innocent young people each year in America's forgotten urban neighborhoods — those plagued by inadequate schools, concentrated poverty, and unemployment.”
Having lived in a city (Gary, Indiana) that earned the title of this country’s murder capital in 1993, I can attest to the connection between violence and socioeconomic conditions. But as early as the late 19th century, W.E.B. Dubois, in The Philadelphia Negro, directly identified a lower tenth of the urban environment who, due to isolation from the mainstream workforce and society at large, found themselves relegated to a permanent state of poverty and susceptible to violence.
This was back in 1899. What Dubois could not possibly foresee were the drastic economic changes that were to appear in the second half of the 20th century and, perhaps more importantly, the way those changes would affect this socioeconomic class. Those changes, namely deindustrialization and late capitalism, combined with the intense introduction of drug culture — crack cocaine in particular and a subsequent increase in intensity of the war on drugs which has led to the imprisonment of millions of African-Americans pushed the group further into the isolation, poverty and susceptibility to violence that Dubois spoke of more than 100 years ago.
Sociologist William Julius Wilson would further explore the concept of the black underclass in a more contemporary setting in his studies. When analyzing the black neighborhood, Wilson focuses largely on the economic plight of the ghetto, in particular, the disappearance of jobs, which is the title of one of his books.
Even more recently, the sociologist Elijah Anderson examines the nature of urban violence which has in many ways come to define the black neighborhood since the 1980s and the dawn of the crack error. He, like Dubuois, recognized that isolation produced by economic hardship combined with racial exclusion come together to create a permanent underclass. His book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City should be required reading for anyone looking to gain an understanding of the culture of gun violence in the Black community.
Fast forward the two mass shootings that occurred this recently in El Paso and Dayton. The national conversation has, per usual, shifted toward gun control legislation. Cable news stations had reporters and producers on the ground in both cities, providing nearly nonstop coverage. During the same weekend, more than 40 people were shot in Chicago. Did you hear about them? Has the specific type of gun violence taking place there and in communities like it been a topic of discussion on any of the news coverage you’ve seen? Most likely not.
When we talk about gun violence in this country, we must understand that only by thinking in analytical terms, as opposed to the sensational way many of our institutions tend to, can we identify and properly diagnose the issues at hand.
