Lies About Black America Are ‘Central’ to Gun Ownership: A Reporter on What We Get Wrong About Gun Violence
Lies that the GOP and Donald Trump promote all day long.
“If you look at the neighborhoods where [gun violence] is most clustered,” Beckett said, it’s located in areas with high levels of poverty, low levels of education, and high rates of unemployment. “The places where our murder rates are the highest are places where there is intense poverty, and where the police are just not solving murders.”
“So in fact, we don’t have a country in which everyone has equal access to having the murder of someone they love solved,” she said, adding, “these are places that are broken in fundamental ways in the relationship between the people who live there and the state that’s supposed to protect them.”
National debates about gun violence should be happening alongside conversations about police brutality and community policing, Beckett says. “Fears of black Americans and their criminality, lies about black Americans,” she says, “are central to this debate, central to the reason people own guns, central to why people want to protect the police, and they feed into why police are armed.”
“They’re all part of this same cycle in which people are afraid and buy more guns and nothing gets passed,” Beckett said.