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First of all, the figure of roughly 30,000 gun deaths per year was endlessly tossed about after Newtown and in the recent Senate hearings about gun violence. Thirty thousand is a huge number. But I didn’t hear anyone say that two-thirds of those gun deaths were suicides – self-inflicted gun deaths.
Now, even after subtracting the sad suicides, something else is going on: deaths by firearms are wildly heavily concentrated in the African-American population of this country. The rate of firearms deaths per 100,000 population is about four times higher in the black population than in the white population.
Gang-related killings account for much of this difference. In large cities with mostly black populations — such as Newark, Detroit, New Orleans — the rate of firearms deaths is almost unbelievably high compared with the rate in the mostly white suburbs.
In any given week, on any given weekend, dozens of black youths are gunned down by other blacks in America’s cities. This is a horror show happening in real life. The total number of deaths from this ongoing disaster far outpaces the deaths in mass killings in Aurora or Newtown.
Now, in no way should either of these grim phenomena be used to minimize the other. But it amazes me that the whole country, the whole world, goes berserk about the killings in a charming town in Connecticut, as we should — while the daily slaughter of black youths by other black youths is just part of the wallpaper of modern life.
Read the full article here at American Spectator.
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