Fear and the Gun Lobby

http://magazine.good.is/articles/nra-racism-fear-gun-control

Very interesting perspective on the American Gun Culture from a man of color.

With the dizzying stream of headlines detailing law enforcement slayings of black and brown citizens, most recently exemplified by the Department of Justice’s damning report on the Ferguson Police Department’s racist culture, it seems that the other end of the spectrum, white vigilante “justice” has faded into the background. Victims of civilians taking the law, and human lives, into their own hands—Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, and others—live on as reminders of how devastating both toxic fear and little gun control can be. Yes, our police on overdrive are symptomatic of a violent, gun-obsessed culture. Yet, as a black male, I have as much reason to fret over being shot dead just for walking on someone’s porch to ask for help, like Renisha McBride did, as I do getting the wrong cop on a routine traffic stop.

The common American delusion that a gun is the key to safety in an inherently unsafe world (despite all signs pointing to a decrease in violent crime), is not only fallacious; it’s dangerous. When NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun (in response to the Sandy Hook shootings), one can’t help but consider who gets to determine who is good and who is bad in his scenario. Surely if urban blacks, or Arab Muslims for that matter, started clamoring for guns in the same manner as rural, white men, there’d be great outcry and antagonism in Gun Nation.

And yet, when an armed white man shoots a person of color dead, as Craig Stephen Hicks did in mid-February when he murdered neighbors Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha execution-style, the official narrative almost never questions the intersection of a weaponized culture and institutional racism. Hicks had 12 guns, and his views on religion, particularly on the Muslim faith that his victims observed, are well known by now. Nevertheless he was mainly cast as a “lone wolf” angry over a “parking dispute.” Having found ourselves on the wrong side of white fear and living to tell about it, be it as a victim of a hate crime or of the frequent micro-aggressions we must trudge through in our daily lives, those of us on the so-called margins know that the carefully honed narrative of a guy upset over a parking space, upset enough to take three young lives, is total bullshit.

As an old white guy I cannot in any meaningful way identify with the author. I simple do not have the history or the life experience. One definition of reality is the world as we perceive it and perceptions are based on experience. My reality is simply different and yet on this issue I can get a glimpse into his.