Is The Violence Policy Center Advocating Restricting The Gun Rights of Blacks?
The Violence Policy Center is pushing for limited access to firearms reduced in the name of “stopping the violence”. It’s the usual gun control argument with one interesting twist: the paper targets blacks specifically. From the paper’s conclusion:
For blacks, like all victims of homicide, guns — usually handguns — are far and away the number one murder tool. Successful efforts to reduce America’s black homicide toll must put a focus on reducing access to firearms.
Set aside for a moment that restricting firearm access is not some magical path to reducing homicide. Does the language in this document bother anybody? It sure sounds like the VPC is advocating restricting the gun rights of blacks.
I imagine the VPC would argue that the paper’s focus on black violence is being extrapolated as part of a call for greater gun control for all people, not just blacks. That doesn’t help things, it just makes it a different kind of stupid. But if that’s the case, why not just say that, instead of advocating “reduc[ing] America’s black homicide toll” by putting a “focus on reducing access to firearms”? The way it’s worded that interpretation is hard to swallow unless the statistics show that most blacks are murdered by whites. They don’t.
In 2008, 3,024 blacks were murdered in the U.S. 2,722 (9%) of them were murdered by other blacks, accoring to the FBI. For comparison’s sake, 13.8% of homicides were the result of black on white violence (504 of 3,643). Please note that I used 2008 statistics because the 2009 report was identified as “preliminary” on the FBI’s website.
For completeness, here are the statistics for 2007, which were the basis for the paper: 3,221 blacks were murdered that year, with whites being the perpetrator 7.6% (245) of the time. Whites were murdered by blacks in 566 of 3,587 cases (15.8%).
The paper ignores the fact that most homicides are committed by a person of the same race as the victim in its calls for restricting access to guns. By doing so, its conclusion reads as a call to limit that access based on race. The paper points out the significantly higher homicide rate for blacks. By framing the report in this way, it puts forth the argument that blacks are far more likely to be murdered than whites and the way to reduce homicides in the black population is to restrict access to guns. However, if it is mostly blacks who kill other blacks, then there should be no need to restrict gun access to non-blacks.
I’m willing to assume that this is not what the authors of the paper intended. If so, it would be a smart move by the Violence Policy Center to clarify that.



