Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  Compared to other progressive critiques, the modern orthodoxy seems not fully thought out on the issue of individual exposure within the window of imminent threats. Of course, the discussion of imminence does not settle things. There are other possible ways to justify the modern orthodoxy.

  Some argue that in urban communities where black voters have elected black administrations, gun prohibition should be respected as an exercise of community autonomy. But the critical question is, how much does black electoral success diminish the worries that make self-defense a crucial private resource? Even the best-intentioned administrations must wrestle with practical, fiscal, and political limitations.

  What do we say to the young black woman in Detroit who arrived home after midnight to find her front door broken open and waited three hours for police to respond to her 911 call? At some earlier time, in some other place, such a delay might signal overt racist neglect. But here the problem was simply overtaxed resources. We might discount this worry by saying that slow police response is rare. But how to dismiss the black policy chief’s triage approach, focusing only on the worst crimes, letting the others go, and betting that the security bureaucracy can tell the difference?3

  From the perspective of the victim, how different is the three-hour police response in Detroit from the situation of Mississippi activist Robert Cooper in 1965? Cooper called the sheriff when a cross burst into flames in front of his home and waited until the next day for someone to show up. One difference is that Cooper had an “automatic shotgun” by the door and used it to let the cross burners “know he was home.”4 So was it a good thing that Cooper was armed? Was it a good thing that the young woman from Detroit was not?

  It oversimplifies things to assess policy through particular examples. But the reality is that many in our age think in pictures rather than in words, and examples give us a foothold for conversation. Our young woman from Detroit is an unknown and might therefore resonate lightly. Other, more familiar images threaten as much noise as clarity. That is the worry with Otis McDonald, the seventy-six-year-old black man who challenged Chicago’s gun ban and was celebrated on the cover of the National Rifle Association’s First Freedom magazine. It is also the worry with Shelly Parker, the black community activist who challenged the District of Columbia gun ban and whose white lawyers defended her constitutional right to arms as part of a broader libertarian vision.

  But other images give us a cleaner focus on the sober, mature members of the community who want tools to defend themselves against violent threats. Consider Mary Thomas, mother of basketball legend Isaiah Thomas. Most descriptions of Mary Thomas manage to work in her front-door stand, sighting down the barrel of a shotgun. Her battleground was the housing projects of Chicago’s west side. Her nemesis was the gang culture that has captured and destroyed so many black boys. Mary Thomas had her own boys to worry about and she refused to cede the problem or the solution to some local bureaucrat or some far-off federal program. When the thugs came after her boys, they were answered by the dangerous end of Mary’s shotgun and her warning, “There’s only one gang here and that’s the Thomas gang.”5

  This image leaves many questions hanging. Why did this tactic work for Mary Thomas? She could not follow her boys everywhere. So there must have been something else going on. And what about the danger of escalating violence?

  These sorts of questions demonstrate that decisions about firearms use amidst personal crises are fraught with complexity. And that sharpens the question to this: Does the complexity of interpersonal violence dictate a generic bureaucratic response or does it demand individual choice by people facing perhaps the greatest personal crisis of their lives?

  We know, of course, that having, brandishing, or using a gun is no guarantee of a happy outcome. That has never been the case. Nonetheless, the black tradition of arms has consistently exalted individual choice in preparations for dealing with imminent violent threats. The modern orthodoxy, granted its full range, tells people facing violent threats to rely on the generic protections of the state security bureaucracy.

  The traditional elevation of private choice on matters of self-defense prompts us to think more critically about the implications of the decision to keep, carry, and use a gun. Consider again the young Detroit woman who waited three hours for the police to come. What if she did have a gun? She might have pulled it, then had it taken and used against her. She might have pulled it and scared off an attacker. She might have fired in self-defense, killing or wounding her assailant. She might have fired and hit or killed an innocent, either with a stray bullet or because she mistook an innocent for an attacker. Even if she lawfully shot a criminal assailant, there is still the trauma of the aftermath and the possibility of being targeted for revenge.

  These sorts of concerns drive much of our thinking about whether preparing for armed self-defense is foolish or sound. They reflect our intuitions about the possibilities within a series of future conflicts. Of course we can’t proceed just on intuition. And this launches us into an assessment of the empirical work and social science on which our policy assessments must rest.

  But first a caution. Even in the middle of sterile empirical analysis, some part of our thinking is inexorably visceral. The reason is we are not just discussing what has happened and projecting from that what will happen. We are using what has happened to project what will happen to us. And that introduces a dose of irrationality. Because deep down most of us believe that we are special, particularly blessed, insightful, or resilient in some peculiar way. It is why so many of us hand over currency and special numbers to the lottery man. This sense of individual exceptionalism shades our expectations about the future. It also threatens to shade our sense of the risks and utilities of firearms. We must keep that bias in mind as we view and reason from the data about self-defense and crime with guns.

  Let’s start with the details of black gun violence, which are fairly captured by this summary.

  The disproportionate rates of violent crime found among African Americans have been described in numerous studies and reports. For example, the FBI reports that in 1998, African Americans, who constitute 13 percent of the general population, were overrepresented among persons arrested for murder (53 percent), robbery (55 percent), aggravated assault (30 percent), and assault (34 percent). A significant characteristic of violent crime in the United States is that most violent incidents tend to involve an intraracial victim-offender relationship pattern. That is, individuals who commit acts of violence generally commit these acts against members of their own racial group. For example, in 1998, 94 percent of black murder victims were slain by black offenders. Similarly in 1998, 87 percent of white murder victims were slain by white offenders. . . .

  The most revealing data regarding the disproportionate impact that violent crime is having on African Americans, particularly black males, is the data on homicide victimization. According to the FBI, in 1998, black males represented 38 percent of known homicide victims, followed in descending order by white males (35 percent), white females (14 percent) and black females (9 percent). High rates of homicide among African Americans also have been reported in compilations of health statistics. According to data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, black males had a homicide death rate of 52.6 per 100,000 in 1996, whereas white males had a homicide death rate of 4.7 per 100,000.

  As a group, violence researchers generally regard individuals in the age range between fifteen and twenty-four as the most murder prone. However, there are significant differences between black and white males of this age in terms of their homicide risk. For example, white males fifteen to twenty-four years of age had a homicide death rate of 6.4 per 100,000 in 1996, whereas black males of this age range had a homicide death rate of 123 per 100,000, nearly twenty times greater than similarly aged white males. Moreover, for every age range, black males have higher rates of homicide death than their white male counterparts of the same ages.

  A significant
trend in homicide patterns involves the increasing youthfulness of homicide offenders and victims. Young black males experienced dramatic increases in both homicide victimization and offending rates in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, the number of homicide victims in the fifteen to twenty-four age group increased nearly 50 percent between 1975 and 1992. Moreover, in 1987, homicide accounted for 42 percent of all deaths among young black males. Persons between the ages of fifteen and nineteen experienced the greatest increases in the rate of death due to homicide in this period. Since 1991, homicide rates have been declining among all race-sex subgroups in the United States. However it is important to note that in spite of the declining homicide rates among black males, homicide remains the leading cause of death among black males between fifteen and twenty four years of age.6

  In the face of this sobering account, the reflex to blame gun proliferation and to wish guns away is natural. The modern orthodoxy translates that reflex into policy with the promise that the right statutory language can solve the problem by dramatically shrinking the gun inventory. Wide endorsement of that approach by the political class implies that it is or should be embraced by anyone who cares about the community. But closer critique reveals both the structural weakness of the supply-control approach and wide diversity within the community about what policy is best.

  The no-guns-equals-no-gun-crime logic of supply controls would be compelling if it could be implemented. But that approach was an unworkable policy long before the Supreme Court judged blanket gun bans unconstitutional. It is not as if we are starting from zero and are making a real choice to have guns or not. Americans already own more than 300 million guns and have a deep cultural attachment to them. That simple fact renders supply-side gun controls of the type recently ruled unconstitutional in Washington, DC, and Chicago essentially empty political gestures.

  Here is why. International data richly demonstrate how, on average, people defy gun bans at a rate of about 3 to 1. Countries that have registered or banned guns estimate having roughly three illegal guns for every legal one. This is simply the average. In many countries, the defiance ratio is far higher.7 And none of those places had anything approaching the civilian gun inventory or the robust gun culture of the United States. In the few American jurisdictions that have attempted limited gun bans, estimates of noncompliance are dramatically higher than the international average.8

  The upshot is that neither the Second Amendment nor weak gun laws are the principle obstacles to successful gun prohibition. The obstacle is that Americans already own nearly half the private firearms on the planet and have an exceptional cultural attachment to them. So the no-guns-equals-no-gun-crime intuition, even if translated into tough statutory language, does not mean guns will disappear. It just means that much, perhaps most, of the existing 300 million–gun inventory would flood into the black market, tilting firearms possession toward the worst people among us. I demonstrated this point in detail in a 2008 analysis titled “Imagining Gun Control in America: Understanding the Remainder Problem.” That work runs many pages. But my assessment is neatly summarized by former New York City police commissioner William Bratton in a Wall Street Journal interview discussing President Obama’s gun-control agenda following the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

  Mr. Bratton likes what he calls the “symbolism” of this agenda, but he’s unsure if its enactment would make a substantive difference. . . . The problem with the gun and ammo bans, he offers, “is that that’s going forward.” They do nothing about the 350 million firearms, including assault weapons, and hundreds of thousands of extended clips already in circulation. “You can’t deal with that retroactively.” As for the practical effect of gun control, he notes that “all the studies that were done about assault weapons after the ban ended after 10 years were pretty much inconclusive.”9

  Gun prohibition failed in the District of Columbia and Chicago because anyone who was willing to break the law could get a gun from the leakage out of the hundreds of millions already out there. In practical terms, this core policy of the modern orthodoxy amounted to de jure prohibition but wide de facto gun possession by the criminal microculture. The few places like Washington, DC, and Chicago that followed this policy led the nation in gun crime. These were also places where the Parker/McDonald class was essentially under siege. Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald sought stringent rules against gun possession by the criminal microclass and legal access to guns for noncriminals. That approach channels the long the black tradition of arms.10

  Supply-control policies at the heart of the modern orthodoxy actually command a thinner following in the community than one would presume from the overwhelming black political allegiance to Democrats, who, like it or not, are the party of gun control. Recent national polling asked, “What do you think is more important, to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?” Sixty-six percent of blacks said it was more important to control gun ownership.11 On the question whether “States and Localities should be able to pass laws banning handguns,” 64 percent of blacks said yes.12 Mid-sixty-percent majorities are consistent with an intuition that blacks would favor gun control. But this is substantially lower than black allegiance to the Democratic Party and presents an interesting contrast with the black leadership, where Democrats rule.

  Pressing into the social science, the picture becomes even more complex. High rates of black victimization from gun crime actually cut two ways. In a population statistically more at risk from violence, one expects to find both a desire to keep guns from criminals and a parallel desire to possess guns for self-defense. This shows up in what researchers call the “fear and loathing” hypothesis, where firearms purchases accelerate on fears of crime, violence, and civil disorder.

  Researchers caution against the simplistic findings from limited questions in popular national surveys. We get a richer sense of patterns of black gun ownership and attitudes toward gun regulation in detailed studies focused at the neighborhood level. Targeted research contradicts the national surveys at several levels. In the national surveys, blacks are less likely than whites to report having a gun in the home. But research at the neighborhood level has found the rate of gun ownership between whites and blacks basically the same.

  With regard to differential Black and white attitudes about gun regulation, the number of questions and specificity of the questions made important differences. The policy option with the least support among the groups was the confiscation of all weapons except for those of the police. The support for confiscation ranged from high of 26% among blacks in high-risk areas to a low of 10.16 among blacks in low-risk areas. . . .

  Support for having the government sell firearms through government owned stores, . . . also varied but Blacks in high-risk neighborhoods were the least supportive—19.4%.

  With few exceptions, the survey respondents appeared to be almost evenly divided in their support for and opposition to the regulation of handguns. In most neighborhoods at least 40% of the people questioned supported handgun regulation and at least the same percentage opposed it. . . .

  The results of the computed gun regulation index show that urban residents are less overwhelmingly supportive of gun regulation than is suggested by studies that use the one-item indicator.13 [Emphasis added.]

  Studies focusing specifically on black attitudes show that a significant cohort of blacks favor gun prohibition or other strong limits on the criminal microculture but disfavor blanket prohibition that would impede self-defense by trustworthy people. One study found that blacks actually disfavored gun bans at higher levels than whites, even though more blacks favored measures like permits and registration. This comports with the intuition that people who fear violence will want guns to protect themselves and also favor laws promising to keep guns from criminals (a policy preference arguably underrepresented by the black political class).14

  A tacit assumption undergirding the modern orthodoxy is that the modern rate of black gun cr
ime is an unprecedented variable that basically ends any debate about the contours of contemporary firearms policy. But it turns out that the black tradition of arms has long demanded balancing the self-defense interest of good people against the costs of criminal violence.

  A report sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health shows that very high rates of homicide victimization and violent crime among blacks is not new. Data from 1925 drawn from selected cities shows that “victimization rates were higher during that era than they are at present. It was not uncommon to find victimization rates in excess of 100 per 100,000.” Local government responses to these data reflected the times. Memphis, for example, was described in 1930 as the homicide capital of the nation. The city fathers discounted the news, arguing that “most of the murders were of Negroes by Negroes, so the police and government could not be held responsible.”15

  The 1925 victimization rate in several other cities exceeded modern rates by substantial measures. The black victimization rate per 100,000 of population in Chicago was 101. In Detroit, it was 102 per 100,000. In Cleveland, it was 113. The rate in Memphis peaked at 129 per 100,000. This was surpassed by peak rates of 189 and 207 per 100,000 in Cincinnati and Miami respectively.16

  Similar trends were reported by preeminent criminologist Marvin Wolfgang in his classic work, Patterns in Criminal Homicide. Wolfgang focused primarily on Philadelphia from 1948 through 1952 and surveyed the findings of a variety of earlier studies from around the country. Over the study period, blacks were 18 percent of the population but 73 percent of homicide victims and 75 percent of homicide offenders in Philadelphia.