Guns Kill People of Color

While we hear a lot about public mass shootings at schools, movie theaters, and malls, such events make up only 2 percent of all gun violence in America. We Americans are actually living in the midst of an epidemic of everyday, one-on-one gun violence.¹

Approximately 80 percent of all gun homicides occur in urban areas and disproportionately claim lives in communities of color.² African American men are fourteen times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to die by homicide.³ This same demographic makes up just 6 percent of the population but accounts for 51 percent of gun homicide victims. African American teens and twenty-somethings are eighteen times more likely than their white peers to be gun violence victims. An African American family has a 62 percent greater chance of losing a son to a bullet than to a car accident, and gun homicides reduce the average life expectancy of black Americans by 3.41 years. Comparatively, whites only lose half a year.⁴

As horrific as these numbers are, they sometimes obscure the true extent of the racial disparity, so consider this shocking statistic: in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a black man between fifteen and twenty-four years of age was one hundred times more likely to be shot by a gun than a white non-Hispanic man of the same age in 2015.⁵ One hundred times; that is revolting.

Hispanic Americans are also at a higher risk of gun violence. Hispanic whites are 2.6 times more likely to be murdered with guns than non-Hispanic whites, and younger Hispanics are hospitalized with firearm-related injuries 2.6 to 17.2 times more often than non-Hispanic whites.

The heart aches reading these numbers and imagining the lives lost, the families devastated, and the communities ruined. The mind demands to know the causes of such devastation.

Sociologists tell us that poverty, failing schools, economic inequality, and racial segregation are all strong predictors of higher rates of gun violence. When the institutions that encourage prosocial behavior break down, it’s not hard to imagine why individuals would turn to underground economies and opportunities to survive. Often those illicit activities require a firearm.

But it would be wrong to assume that entire underserved communities are responsible for the violence. In fact, most gun crime is perpetrated by a small group of high-risk individuals in very specific geographical locations and social networks. In 2016, for instance, “50 percent of all the shootings in Chicago occurred in a handful of poorer neighborhoods, including Austin, Garfield Park, North and South Lawndale, Englewood, and West Pullman.” The Brennan Center has found that just five neighborhoods in Chicago accounted for 10 percent of the national firearm homicide increase in 2016. The crime is “even more concentrated within those communities, occurring within just a few blocks,” a study from Northwestern University found. Much of the carnage is fueled by interpersonal disputes that trigger retaliatory shootings within social networks where people are routinely exposed to violence and are increasingly likely to become its victims.⁶ In particularly high-crime areas of Chicago, when someone in a certain social network is shot with a firearm, there is approximately a 20 percent chance that that person’s friends and associates will also fall victim to gun violence within the next eighty days, researchers have found. A cycle of violence ensues.

To make matters worse, police are failing to solve these crimes and thus failing to deter people from committing them. “We are not catching anybody, [and that] means that you could shoot somebody with impunity in Chicago,” Wesley Skogan, who studies crime at Northwestern University, explained during a March 2018 presentation on crime in Chicago. “An implication of that is you got to look out for yourself, a lot of gun carrying is defensive, people are worried about their own lives,” and they are more likely to resort to “preemptive violence or retaliatory vengeance in order to model the effects of a criminal justice system which is now failing,” he explained.⁷

A few individuals may perpetuate this violence, but it harms the entire community and feeds a cycle that is difficult to reverse. “One study found that for each homicide in a city, 70 residents flee, further hollowing out neighborhoods where tax revenues are already low and services insufficient,” a report from Everytown for Gun Safety points out. In fact, “a single gunshot wound has a societal cost of about $1 million when all the consequences are added up,” including depressed real estate prices, medical costs, diminished business activity, and lower economic growth. Estimates show that gun violence costs major cities billions of dollars every year.

Some of this killing also occurs at the hands of police. Police officers, after all, operate in the same world we do, a world where racial assumptions and stereotypes are pervasive. While the overwhelming majority of police officers are hardworking professionals, they perform their jobs with firearms, within a heavily armed gun culture that views weapons as the ultimate means of self-defense and promotes a stand-your-ground, shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude. Maybe that’s why an American between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine is shot and killed by a police officer in the United States almost every day. Of those killed, 34 percent are African American, and at least 40 percent are unarmed.⁸ Take institutional racism, add to it police brutality and a toxic gun culture, and you’re left with thousands of unarmed black men shot dead in the prime of their lives.

DeJuan Patterson’s story illustrates the intersection of law enforcement, guns, and race. Patterson, a native Baltimorean, was biking home from his job at Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore one night in 2005, when he was robbed at gunpoint and shot. He immediately went into shock. His head was bleeding, and he lost vision in one eye. When he regained consciousness, he found himself staring down the barrel of another gun: a police officer who saw DeJuan as a possible suspect and yelled obscenities at him, ordering him to get up off the ground. In a matter of minutes, he became, as he put it to me, both a gunshot victim and an alleged criminal.

It took DeJuan ten years to tell this story. These days, he tells it often, in hopes of drawing awareness to the ways gun violence in his community intersects with other issues faced by people of color: police brutality, lack of jobs and economic mobility, lack of help for mental health problems exacerbated by poverty, lack of access to quality education, and sometimes even lack of clean water. In 2011, DeJuan helped start the BeMore Group, an organization that hosts legal clinics, financial literacy classes, and meals with police officers and works with other nonprofits and governments to educate them about the challenges young people in their community face.⁹ DeJuan describes his mission as working to find “a solution for the person in front of the gun as well as the person behind the gun.” For him, guns are just one element of a whole constellation of interrelated problems. His work is a sober reminder of how high the stakes are and how pervasive gun violence has been for young people like him.

Everyday gun violence rarely attracts the kind of media coverage that mass shootings do. If you conduct a Google News search for shootings right after a highly publicized tragedy occurs, you will almost always find more articles about that single mass shooting than stories about the far more ubiquitous violence that happens every single day in America. A Google News search analysis performed by the Century Foundation think tank over the months before and after the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 revealed that the term “Orlando shooting” generated 14,747 news articles while “shootings in Chicago” yielded 262. Orlando “received sixty-five times more coverage than the Chicago shootings that have left thousands wounded and hundreds dead,” the researchers found.¹⁰ As an advocate once told me, the tone of the media coverage is also different. When black people die, it’s a crime story. When whites die, it’s a loss of life story.

There is hope that this paradigm is shifting, however. The marches that followed the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, managed to fuse the voices of those who have long lived with an everyday threat of gun violence with the survivors of mass tragedy, creating collective recognition of the scope of the problem. We as a society are beginning to acknowledge the undeniable intersection of gun violence and race. People in poor, urban, mixed-race communities often find themselves on both ends of a gun barrel and grapple with these realities every day.