Editor's note: Bassam
Gergi is studying for a master's degree in comparative government at St.
Antony's College, Oxford, where he is also a Dahrendorf Scholar. Ali
Breland studies philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.
(CNN) -- On the Sunday after the Newtown massacre,
President Barack Obama traveled to Connecticut to comfort the grieving
community. As the president offered what he could to the town, other
American communities, in less visible ways, were grappling with their
own menace of violence.
In Camden, New Jersey
-- a city that has already suffered 65 violent deaths in 2012 ,
surpassing the previous record of 58 violent deaths set in 1995 -- 50
people turned out, some bearing white crosses, to mourn a homeless woman
known affectionately as the "cat lady" who was stabbed to death (50 of
the deaths so far this year resulted from gunshot wounds.)
Bassam Gergi
In Philadelphia, on the
same Sunday, city leaders came together at a roundtable to discuss their
own epidemic of gun violence; the year-to-date total of homicides is
322. Last year, 324 were killed. Of those victims, 154 were 25 or
younger. A councilman at the roundtable asked, "How come as a city we're
not in an outrage? How come we're not approaching this from a crisis
standpoint?"
Ali Breland
The concerns go beyond Philadelphia. In the week following the Newtown massacre, there were at least a dozen gun homicides in Chicago,
Detroit, Baltimore and St. Louis alone. In a year of highly publicized
mass shootings, inner-city neighborhoods that are plagued by gun
violence have continued to be neglected and ignored.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, large metropolitan areas account for more than two-thirds of
deaths by gun violence each year, with inner cities most affected. The
majority of the victims are young, ranging in age from their early teens
to mid-20s, and black.
To track these violent
deaths, many communities and media organizations have set up agonizing
online trackers -- homicide watches or interactive maps -- that show
each subsequent victim as just another data point. These maps are
representative of a set of issues far larger than the nameless dots
suggest.
In the immediate
aftermath of Newtown, as politicians and public figures across America
grapple with the horrible truths of gun violence, far less visible from
the national spotlight is the steady stream of inner-city victims.
Illegal firearms confiscated in a weapons bust in New York's East Harlem is on display at an October news conference.
The media is fixated, and
with justification, on the string of high-profile massacres that have
rocked the nation in Aurora, Colorado; Tucson, Arizona; Virginia Tech;
and now in Newtown. Yet in many of America's neighborhoods most affected
by the calamity of gun violence, there is a warranted exasperation --
residents are tired, tired of the ubiquity of guns, tired of fearing for
their children's safety, tired of being forgotten.
Fiery debate over guns in America
Critiquing a narrow media
focus doesn't deny the horrible, tragic nature of the massacre at Sandy
Hook Elementary School; mass shootings, however, make up only a small
fraction of America's shockingly high level of gun crime.
Fareed Zakaria's take: Gun control
In his study "American
Homicide," Randolph Roth showed that while the overall risk of being
murdered is higher in America than it is in any other first-world
democracy, homicide rates vary drastically among groups.
89 guns per 100 people in the U.S.
According to Roth,
if current trends are maintained, one out of every 158 white males born
today will be murdered, but for nonwhite males it is likely one of
every 27 born today will be murdered.
Morgan and others debate gun violence
The stark difference in
these racial trends can be traced to the high levels of racial
segregation in America's cities, which have created a spatial barrier
between poor inner-city youths of color and more mainstream America -- a
barrier that is often responsible for the lack of media and political
attention paid to inner-city problems.
Many experts claim that
actually it is the spectacular nature of mass shootings that naturally
magnifies media coverage and explains the resonance of these tragedies
to the broader public. Inner-city violence on its own, however, does not
suffer from a lack of awful, spectacular violence and calamity. In
fact, the gruesome nature of violence in inner cities has contributed to
widespread social desensitization to gun violence. How then do we
explain the differing public responses?
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An indicator of the
difference of attention levels lies in the tone of the public rhetoric
in the wake of mass shootings: "This was supposed to be a safe
community," and "This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen here."
These statements imply
that in America's leafy-green small towns and suburbs, gun violence is a
shocking travesty; it strikes against America's perception of what is
acceptable. In contrast, gun violence in the American metropolis has
been normalized, and the public and media display a passive indifference
toward the lives of inner-city youths.
This normalization of
inner-city violence is due in part, to the isolation and segregation of
America's ghettos from wider America, but it is also due to a sense that
the victims of inner-city violence are responsible for their own
condition.
As Robert Sampson, a
professor at Harvard University, has highlighted, the gun violence in
American cities is born out of neighborhood characteristics such as
poverty, racial segregation and lack of economic opportunity. This
shortened explanation for the high levels of inner-city violence has
often been mistaken to imply that it is the direct choice of inner-city
residents to remain either in poverty or in their segregated community
that leads to their victimization.
In reality, the victims
of inner-city gun violence are the victims of a dual tragedy. The first
is that the poverty and segregation, which play a crucial role in
spurring the downward cycle of crime, are the result of social
arrangements predicated on longstanding oppression and prejudice.
Through a complex mix of
violence, institutional arrangements and exploitation, black Americans
were pressured into ghettos, which are the hotbeds of contemporary gun
violence. Their inability to escape their conditions is not a choice but
rather the byproduct of continued structural discrimination. Slowing
the tide of inner-city deaths through gun control is therefore a
modern-day civil rights issue.
If the refusal of
America's national politicians to move on gun control before Newtown
represents a political failure and a paucity of American will, then the
disregard for the lives of inner-city youths stricken by gun violence on
a daily basis is an illustration of the limits of American compassion.
The slaughter of young
children en masse should be a moment of reckoning for any society, but
there is a day-by-day, child-by-child slaughter occurring in America
that has gone on too long and is yet to be reckoned with.
If Newtown should teach
us anything, it is that all of us in America share this same short
moment of life, and that we all seek to ensure safety, security and
prosperity for our children.
As Vice President Joe
Biden and the presidential task force meet to negotiate about what new
gun laws to recommend, they must look to Sandy Hook Elementary and
beyond. We need to protect the children of Newtown from the threat of
future gun violence, but the children of Chicago and Camden and Detroit
deserve the same long-term security.
We may not be able to
ensure absolute security for America's children, but through smarter
policy America can surely save more of its children from gun violence.
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