is that while Black people in the hood are more likely to be victims of gun violence, it can and does happen everywhere. And increasingly so. From Las Vegas to Parkland to Orlando, mass shootings are a near daily occurrence in America. Every time, Chicago gets trotted out as proof that gun control won’t work, but the reality is that Chicago’s problem with gun violence is America’s problem with gun violence.
It’s true that in any area socially and economically isolated from the mainstream, crime rates are higher, and that poverty often leads to illegal markets. But from bootlegging to the drug trade, violence is most likely to proliferate where there is no other recourse for solving disputes. And that is why we see increasing rates of gun violence in rural areas, as well as higher death rates, even as gun violence declines in urban areas—though it’s not a fact commonly cited in the news.
What compounds the problem of violence in the hood is the long history of isolated Black communities in America not being able to trust law enforcement as, over time, they have proven themselves to be largely indifferent to violence against marginalized people. The same attitudes from law enforcement can be found in rural areas, where help may be farther away and weapons are a key part of life because hunting for food is still common. In both cases, gun culture often develops out of necessity. While the number of people in law enforcement in rural areas may be lower, which suggests an illusion of greater safety because of lower populations, class and racial divides reflect the wider societal biases. Crime rates have been dropping for decades all over the country, but higher population numbers in urban centers mean more crime because there are more people and more media coverage. Meanwhile, in rural areas, it’s not that crime rates are substantially lower; they are just less likely to be covered in the same way by whatever press may exist in the area, if there’s any local media at all.
White flight suburbs and former sundown towns are a prime example of places where the crimes that are happening aren’t highlighted because the criminals in question are white. In the absence of racial diversity, class can take center stage. Even though white privilege doesn’t disappear when poverty comes into play, the reality is that poverty limits access to the power and sense of safety that come with being one of the property owners who our current policing system is designed to protect. Though our culture frames the white working class as important, as a primary concern, the reality is that although poor white people fare better than poor Black people, ultimately in situations without an Other (read: someone not white), class differences make poor white people the target of oppressive structures.
The idea that poor white people are morally and socially inept, too ignorant to be a part of the wider world, excuses them from the racist systems that they lack the access to create even when they benefit from them. It’s that internal oppression that whiteness enacts on itself that helps create a narrative that the world is out to get working-class white people—and that people of color are specifically at fault for their problems. Add in the ways racism positions guns as the solution to crime, and these conditions breed a gun culture that embraces violence while resisting any efforts to curtail access to weapons, regardless of who gets hurt. America’s history has been defined by its violence, the question of how to respond to it largely answered by law enforcement obtaining bigger and better weapons to counter the ones held by criminals. We’ve taken war weapons to the streets and homes of civilians with no idea what harm these weapons can do, or that escalation is never a solution.
We know that education is key to success in America and around the world. But almost three million children per year are exposed to gun violence once you factor in violence from crime, in homes, accidents, and suicide. Gun-related deaths are now the second-leading cause of death for American children, who are fourteen times more likely to be killed with guns before age fifteen than children in other high-income countries. Americans aged fifteen to twenty-four are twenty-three times more likely to die from gun violence. Sixty percent of American children and teens who are victims