A mass shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana, and, once more, the call goes up to restrict firearms. “You can’t fix people, but you can fix the gun laws.” Perhaps we can’t fix people, but does that mean citizens should lose the most effective means of self-defense from broken men who mean us harm?
We have to be able to defend our lives and the lives of others. Self-defense is among the most fundamental of human rights. Protecting the innocent is among our most sacred obligations. It may feel counterintuitive, but more guns are the answer. Studies show that as per capita firearm ownership increases, murder rates decrease. Firearms prevent gun violence.
The media directs the public to think that gun violence mostly takes the form of what occurred in Shreveport, which they describe as an act of violence in an ordinary town. Standing back, we see that gun violence is almost exclusively associated with the Blue City conditions and cultures. Gun violence—excluding suicide—disproportionately involves blacks.
But Shreveport is a Blue City. A few media outlets have shared photos of the Shreveport shooter. The man’s name is Shamar Elkins. Had the shooter been white, his name and image would be all over the media from the git-go. “Mass shooter” brings to mind young whites. But, in reality, white mass shooters are a minority in this type of violence.
Shreveport is 56 percent black. The Cedar Grove neighborhood is predominantly black. The shooting fits the pattern of many domestic-related shootings in urban areas. Shreveport has experienced a steady, long-term population decline, and violence is an endemic problem there.
French sociologist Émile Durkheim would ask observers to attend to that fact and consider it in the context of anomie, a condition of normative breakdown in disorganized communities. Combined with the dramatic overrepresentation of black men in gun violence, a picture emerges that our betters think we’d be better off not looking at or thinking about. Think instead about guns.
Excluding suicide is important in discussions about gun violence, since white rural males are overrepresented in suicide, and suicide with a gun is many times greater than gun homicides. Including suicide skews the statistics. However, Shreveport appears to be what’s called “family annihilation” or, more technically, “familicide.” In the end, the shooter was likely expecting to die. He may have sought suicide-by-cop.
You will hear about how America is different from other countries, given its level of gun violence. America is the “killing fields.” And Trump is ignoring the problem (people are even posting a video of Trump responding to a question about Alex Pretti and misrepresenting it as occurring yesterday). These things are being said across social media as I write this.
Gun violence is indeed greater in the US than in other similar countries. But, again, this has to do with inner-city violence. European states do not have large concentrations of blacks living in ghettos shaped by a culture of violence. This difference explains almost all of the variability in gun violence cross-nationally.
It’s irrational to call for restrictions on firearms because man annihilates his family, not because it is rare (it is), but because the argument gives guns agency, which, as inanimate objects, they cannot possess. Guns don’t shoot themselves. People pull the trigger. And broken people find other ways to perpetrate violence if denied guns. Moreover, the idea that restricting guns denies them to those who use them is a failure of imagination. Most of the guns used in America’s inner cities are not legally purchased by those who use them. And why should the freedoms of law-abiding citizens be taken away because of broken people?
Progressives mock “thoughts and prayers,” but that’s about the only thing one can do in situations like this—unless they mean to politicize gun rights. If society is serious about gun violence, it will have to confront the Blue City and the culture of violence dependency and fatherless entrenches there. It will, moreover, preserve the tools citizens require to defend themselves against the consequences of progressive social policies.
freedom and reason 