Pirate's Cove

Over at The Hill, Frederick Staidum Jr., Ph.D has been given a platform to complain about gun ownership, and he sees everything in terms of raaaaacism and sex, because he’s a scholar of race and sexuality in 19th-century American culture and literature at Loyola University Chicago

Gun control is all about gun violence — we can’t forget who we’re trying to protect

In response to growing activism following the Parkland, Fla., mass shooting, federal and state legislatures have passed a variety of new gun control measures. The 2018 omnibus spending bill established the STOP School Violence Act, which increases coordination between law enforcement and schools, provides mental health crises training for teachers and administrators, and ”hardens” school safety systems with metal detectors, door-locking mechanisms, and anonymous reporting and emergency communication technologies. (snip)

Florida passed the most controversial of reforms: arming teachers. And just last week, Vermont’s NRA A-rated governor surprised the nation by signing the strictest gun-control laws in the history of his state.

Vermont is being sued over parts of their just passed laws for Constitution violations, at both the state and federal levels. But, you know, many of these laws are raaaaacist

While these developments are celebrated by gun-control advocates and political observers as dislodging longstanding NRA-backed recalcitrance, we still aren’t getting to the root of the problem: not simply controlling access to guns, but reducing gun violence. No matter how well-intentioned, these policies can and have produced unjust results, especially for black women and girls.

For example, look what happens when we give law enforcement a larger role in schools. While black students make up 15.5 percent of total enrollment, they account for 33.41 percent of all students subjected to school-related arrests.

This disparity affects black girls at a disproportionate rate, which is probably related to the perception of black girls as less innocent, more adult-like and in need of less protection than white girls of the same age.

Could it possibly be that the Black students, especially the girls, are more apt to be involved in conduct that gets them detained and even arrested? If people are going to play the race card, they damned well better have some facts to offer that they didn’t deserve to be arrested. Why do we never hear this about Latinos/Hispanics or Asians?

Another vulnerable population are victims of intimate partner violence. While laws exist to prevent convicted abusers from possessing guns, most only apply to legal spouses and parents, which leaves a so-called “girlfriend loophole.” In other words, a violent husband may be restricted from purchasing a gun, while a violent boyfriend is not. Thankfully, some of the newer laws attempt to eliminate this loophole.

Mr. Staidum has a point, which is why many states are looking to expand on these laws. But, of course

Still, still policies don’t address the disproportionate gun deaths of transgender women of color. Approximately half of all transgender people will endure intimate partner violence during their life, yet laws written to keep guns out of abusers’ hands often won’t protect them.

Part of the problem is the narrow language of “domestic” and “girlfriends,” which allows intimate violence experienced outside of “traditional” cisgender and heterosexual relations to fall through the cracks.

Not just the gender confused, but Black gender confused.

We’re focused on mass shootings rather than the emotional and psychological pain caused by more frequent forms of gun violence plaguing black communities. Again, part of the problem is bias. Whites have a history of not seeing black people as vulnerable, which limits the imagined reach of reforms. Researchers at the University of Virginia and Northwestern University found that 6 in 10 white respondents choose black subjects as those who are more likely to embody superhuman characteristics, such as withstanding “the pain of burning hot coals” or quelling “hunger and thirst.”

Well, there’s an interesting thing. Why is there such a high rate of gun violence in Black communities, which tend to be in cities run by the Democratic Party? Mr. Staidum wants to blame this on Whitey with his “whites have a history of not seeing black people as vulnerable.” Perhaps he should make it about politics, since one party sees blacks as simply a voting block to be pandered to and controlled on Democrat plantations. Perhaps he should wonder why there is such a high rate of violence, including with firearms, in these Black communities. Look at himself, as it where.

The point is, we can’t have an effective gun control debate without a comprehensive, intersectional approach to gun violence, which centers the experience of women and girls of color. Otherwise, we risk creating solutions that inordinately harm our most at-risk populations.

Funny. We have to use even further Leftist policies to solve the fallout from Leftist policies.

At the end of the day, though, this is all about further and further restrictions on the ability of law abiding citizens to own firearms for protections. As someone in the Hill comments asks “The one question I ask and the left never answers is this. How does taking firearms away from law abiding citizens and making them helpless make criminals harmless?” Well, just go to Chicago or Baltimore, and see how their restrictive gun policies work.