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Aug 23, 1999 |
Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do
BY DAVID HOROWITZ
(08/16/99)
I thought David Horowitz's column on Aug. 16 might be a chance to critically explore the reasoning of the NAACP's decision to sue the gun industry. But the NAACP suit is just a device for Horowitz's rambling diatribe about how racism is a collective hallucination of black people used to deflect responsibility for anything that goes wrong.
Too bad. There was an intelligent argument to be made against the way civil rights organizations spend money and clout in quixotic legal tussles while problems within the black community continue to fester. Another possible issue is how demonizing the tobacco, gun and entertainment industries may decrease the feeling of personal responsibility in all sectors of our society. Yet another is how America has switched from hero worship to victim worship in the last 30 years, and how that leads to a culture of learned helplessness.
But had Horowitz chosen to take on any of those angles, someone might have demanded cogent thinking and a well-structured argument. It's an unfortunate fact that discussion of racial issues is left to the ranters on all sides.
-- Alicia R. Montgomery
A constitutionally protected right to bear arms should not be a free ticket to capitalize on a vulnerable market with a violent product. It is not inappropriate for any of us to to attempt to force those who make weapons to act responsibly.
Anyone who would question a group's desire to call those who profit from their misery to account for their actions either misses the point entirely or has ulterior motives.
-- Ned Landin
It's about time we stopped sweeping the truth under the rug. If we finally admit to these problems in the black community, we might some day arrive at some meaningful solutions.
-- Alan Davis
First of all, it remains to be seen whether the gun industry's hands-off attitude regarding the distribution of its lethal product has indeed been irresponsible. If the threat of a lawsuit for forces the industry to police itself to prevent its guns, especially handguns, from somehow escaping the legitimate market and finding their way into illegal distribution channels, then we'll all be better off.
But Horowitz attempts to have both ways in his piece as he discusses the plight of blacks. In one instance, he says black leaders aren't doing enough to address issues their affecting communities, such as drugs and violence. Then, he points out that "heavier penalties (for crack cocaine dealers) were originally demanded by black leaders who claimed that crack was associated with street violence in the black community and the white criminal justice system did not care enough about its destructive consequences to make the penalties harsh." So which is it? Are black leaders in psychological denial about the crime problem or aren't they? Or are they raising legitimate questions about how the policing in their communities is being carried out?
Horowitz makes the mistake, like so many other white conservative commentators, of assuming blacks are waiting for that mythical black leader to bring word down from the mountaintop on what needs to be done and how to get there. Years before white kids began slaughtering other white kids with semi-automatic gunfire in suburban communities, black kids were being killed one at a time by other black kids on city playgrounds at across the country for equally stupid reasons. But black parents didn't sit on their hands waiting for a black savior to tell them what to do. They organized. There have been numerous "Stop the Violence"-type campaigns in cities across the country.
Horowitz essentially dismisses as irrelevant the history of blacks in this country. Why is it history matters to every other group except blacks? Jews can vow to never forget the Holocaust, and rightfully so. But let a black person mention slavery or the effect of the subsequent 100 years of Jim Crow laws and practices, and watch the eyes roll. Horowitz and others speak as though the slate was wiped clean the very moment slavery was abolished, legalized segregation was wiped out and the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted. They tend to suggest that once blacks overcame more than a century of legalized white oppression, blacks were accepted as first-class citizens with loving arms by the white majority. Well, such thinking is intellectually dishonest, and Horowitz knows it.
To be sure, traditional black leadership has at times appeared to be out of step with the times and slow to react to newer challenges. But Horowitz's commentary reads more like an indictment of blacks than as an indictment of the contemporary civil rights movement. And he replaces the idea of today's black struggles being linked exclusively to white oppression with an equally dubious claim that white society can do, and perhaps has done, no wrong when it comes to blacks.
-- Bob Campbell
Rochester Hills, Mich.
Horowitz calmly cast out a canard commonly found on all the neo-Nazi Web sites: Although blacks make up only 12 percent of the population they are responsible for 46 percent of the violent crime. Horowitz is repeating a lie, and he should do better research.
The FBI publishes the Uniform Crime Reports annually. It is the only comprehensive crime report in America, and is widely quoted and widely misunderstood. The UCR does not report that blacks are responsible for 46 percent of violent crime because the report deals with arrests, not convictions. Horowitz is corrupting our constitutional presumption of innocence.
The UCR for 1997, the most recent year for which data is available, states that blacks were arrested for 41.1 percent of all violent crime included in the report, but it makes no presumptions about the ratio of blacks in the general populations of the areas reporting.
There are 17,000 arresting agencies in the United States, serving a population (in 1997) of about 254 million. However, the UCR report for "Total Arrests -- Distribution by Race" includes only 9,271 agencies serving a total population of 183 million. The FBI does not tell us which agencies are included in the report. If the agencies included in the report were tilted toward police departments in large urban centers, such as Chicago, Los Angeles or St. Louis, the ratio of blacks in the general population would be much greater than 12 percent, and the violent crime committed by blacks would not look so wildly out of proportion to their numbers.
Surely Horowitz can operate a calculator. If he divided the total population included in the report (183,239,000) by the number of agencies included in the report (9,271), he would find the average population served by these agencies is 19,765 people. Since the average population served by each of the 17,000 agencies in the country is less than 15,000 people Horowitz would discover that the report is indeed tilted toward larger urban centers.
Since blacks make up a much greater proportion of the population in large urban centers, blacks being arrested for 41.1 percent of violent crime may not be out of proportion to their numbers. Indeed, it may well be that whites are arrested at a greater rate than their proportion in these urban populations.
-- R. F. Gilmore
San Diego
DAVID HOROWITZ RESPONDS:
I didn't take my statistics from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. I used the Bureau of Justice Statistics (see Felony Sentences in State Courts, 1996). These numbers represent convictions, not just arrests. Moreover they represent state statistics. State courts handle 96 percent of all felony convictions in the United States. The remaining 4 percent handled in federal courts involve mainly nonviolent offenses, such as drug trafficking or fraud. The Bureau of Justice Statistics show that blacks commit 46 percent of violent crime.
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