It could be guns, but it is something deeper than Guns Killing People

By Don Allen - Journal of A Black Teacher 

I write as a Black American who has attended too many funerals. Too many mothers are fainting in church pews. Too many kids are learning the cadence of gunfire as a lullaby. And the real truth is this: it is or might very well be about guns, but it is most definitely about the individuals who use them and choose to kill. Let’s be clear, guns are everywhere in this country. Easy to buy, easy to hide, easy to pull out in anger. 

The United States has more guns than people. If access were the only problem, then mass shootings in white suburbs and rural areas would look like the everyday reality of Black neighborhoods. But they don’t. We know who dies in disproportionate numbers: young Black men, women, and children who never got a chance to grow up. That’s not a statistic, it’s an obituary waiting to be written. But where is the national outrage? Where are the same government officials who wail for gun bans after a shooting in Minneapolis, a movie theater in Colorado, or a 31-year-old political activist at Utah Valley University who was senselessly gunned down?

But when those bullets hit Black bodies, the discussion is different. It's no longer something about policy, but culture, crime, and personal responsibility. You see the double standard, and it's revolting.

I'm not suggesting guns don't play a role. They do. A gun made specifically to kill shouldn't be any easier to acquire than a set of sneakers. But not addressing the circumstances in which killing seems a reasonable choice is akin to applying a Band-Aid to a bullet hole. Abject poverty, hopelessness, schools that don't work, no jobs, a system that's been busy for generations defining Black as crime, those are the hotbeds of violence. So when I ask, “Where is the call for banning guns?” I’m also asking, “Where is the call for saving Black lives?”

Where is the urgency to treat shootings in Black communities with the same gravity that America treats suburban massacres? Where is the investment in schools, in families, in housing, in healthcare, the things that actually keep people alive? We require not only a gun ban, but a ban on callousness. A ban on labeling entire communities as "lost causes." 

We must hold murderers accountable, but we must also hold a country accountable for breeding neighborhoods where death seems an inevitability. As I've witnessed too many boys buried before they are men, too many mothers are burying their daughters before prom. Too many young men make a trigger pull easier than a talk. Guns are the tool, but people and the system for which they are fashioned are the story. And until America cares as much for the people as it professes to care for the guns, the funerals are not going to stop.