How Not to Prevent Gun Violence
Six years ago, my teachers invited me to participate in a National Walkout to protest gun violence. The protest was prompted by a school shooting which killed seventeen people in Parkland, Florida. But although that incident was the pretext, the walkout was part of a broader national protest against the National Rifle Association and, by implication, the Second Amendment to the Constitution. After deliberating for several days, I was the only person in my school who chose not to participate. I was made to sit in the vestibule while several hundred students and teachers streamed past me on the way out and the way back, giving me strange looks. Later some of my friends asked me why I hadn’t gone along.
I told them that I don’t favor gun violence – who does? Yet I felt uneasy with an activism that only staged walkouts when white students died in school shootings, without protesting the twenty-times-more-common shootings of young Black males. They’re the ultimate victims of what Chief Justice Warren E. Burger once called the “fraud” of our national firearms discourse, which fails to address issues of racial policy, national identity, and political lobbying per se.
I go to school in the Bronx, one of the most violent places in America, where guns are both illegal and common. Only one percent of shooting victims here in 2021 was white. Because communities of color tend to distrust law enforcement, the Bronx and similar urban neighborhoods are like Old Western towns with crooked sheriffs. With the homicide-clearance rate in New York City recently falling to a historic low of 27%, people have taken the law into their own hands — functioning sometimes as de facto militias defending their natural rights, but too often violating the rights of others. Yet local politicians and activists, worried about disparate rates of minority incarceration, have opposed special police units formed to remove illegal guns. Black Lives Matter of Greater New York leader Hawk Newsome even threatened “bloodshed” and “riots” if Mayor Eric Adams reinstated an undercover anti-gun unit. What’s the point of pushing for stricter gun-possession laws if we won’t effectively enforce the laws we already have?
Since most handguns in the Bronx come from states where they’re legal, only a national ban will take these weapons off our streets. Yet gun ownership and the resulting risk of violence are ingredients of our national identity. In the Old West, where it might take days to reach a lawman, every family had to be a mini-militia. The romance of the Western epic, our American Iliad, has given us a gauzy, sentimental reverence for cold-steel implements of murder. A national handgun ban might provoke armed resistance in states where gun ownership has become a kind of religion. To oppose gun violence while evading these red-state identity issues seems to me futile. Whenever there’s a mass shooting, anti-gun activists like to say that the problem exists locally but can only be addressed nationally – and that’s true enough. But unless one repeals or amends the Second Amendment, this talk is a lot of well-meaning wind.
Equally futile is to oppose the gun-rights lobby, but not the lobby process. This amounts to hating the player while loving the game. Thomas Jefferson warned George Washington to ban lobbying, but Washington demurred. Fast forward 250 years, and we find the Senate’s most progressive senator, Bernie Sanders, equivocal on gun control: his home state makes guns. As long as lobbying is allowed, people will appeal to politicians for special favors, and issues will not be decided democratically, but financially. To object only when the lobby gores one’s own ox seems to me a form of bad faith.
Chief Justice Burger rightly called much of our gun-discourse fraudulent. What he meant is that the original rationale for the Second Amendment no longer exists. We needed a popular militia in case the British returned, but the Redcoats aren’t coming. This realization is only a starting point for change, however, and not a means to achieve it. We rightly focus on the supply of guns, but wrongly ignore demand for them. According to Elijah Anderson, the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, centuries of systemic racism have so disempowered young men of color that gun-possession seems for many a rational means of obtaining self-respect, power and honor. In their own eyes they are protecting their families and themselves, like action-heroes in movies or video games. Addressing the “root causes” of gun violence through school walkouts or midnight basketball leagues misses one central psychic fact: In masculine myth, a Glock 9mm in the Bronx means what a Colt .45 meant in the Old West and what a sword meant in the siege of Troy. Reform which fails to redress cultural context, racial realities, and vote-buying will leave a national crisis unremedied, and our streets still running with blood.
Eden Riebling attends the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, New York, where she is a contributing editor to its literature-humanities journal, The Classicist. Her policy passions include liberty of conscience, freedom of speech, and promoting equity through empathy.