It has been a very distressing week in the United States. On Tuesday, July 5th, 2016, the American broadcast media began reporting yet another killing by police, this one in Baton Rouge Louisiana, and again the racial overtones of the incident were apparent to everyone: the victim of the fatal shooting was African-American and the police officers were white.
Two days later, on the 7th, yet another killing with the same racial overtone occurred. An African-American passenger in a car was shot and killed by a jumpy white police officer in Minnesota.
On the evening of July 7th 2016 demonstrations and protests sprang up spontaneously in major cities across the U.S. And news stations were reporting “shots fired” at a demonstration in Dallas Texas.
Americans awoke to startling news on the 8th. Twelve police officers had been shot in Dallas in what was characterized as “an ambush,” and five of the officers were confirmed dead. Race was a very evident factor there too. The “suspect” stated that he wanted to kill whites, clearly partly in response to the recent lethal incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota, and especially that he wanted to kill white police officers. The American people had awoken on the 8th, if they’d smelled any coffee at all that morning, to countenance that their nation was suffering dreadfully in a social circumstance that went far deeper than issues of race. Americans were dividing, disparate and recalcitrant perspectives on such tragedies dividing them.
One of the major political candidates for president immediately stated that she would, if she were elected, support the spending of one billion dollars of federal funds on special training for state, local and municipal police. Public unease and outcry about the Minnesota victim and the Louisiana victim, Alton Sterling, had yielded a reflexive search for a silver bullet.
But the sociological strife of the past week goes far beyond issues of race-prejudice, race-bias and profiling. It also reaches far beyond matters of policing. Think about a woman whose hair is coming out in huge clumps on her comb when she’s undergoing chemotherapy, and think about that same woman deciding that she needs to buy a comb with more amenable tines. Yes, we’re bruised as a society, but the skin color and the policing are not the real sicknesses, but the mere backdrop. An injustice that might have been a simple quasi-racist detention or stop or detainment of some sort or other in each case turned out to be lethal. Our core sickness is that the American people and their government do not wholeheartedly support all the cohering elements of a peaceful and ordered society. As it was with uncivilized slavery, so it is now with an acivilizational American gun culture.
When a political aspirant says she’ll ask Congress to appropriate one billion dollars on something so specific and so needed, we’re impressed. The proposition will surely gain the candidate more votes in November, as it was positively calculated to do. But there can be a downside to this massive spending of public funds. When we spend so much on something so specific, and when we are very sure that this is an important thing to address (better training of police), we can, in our self-satisfied certitude in treating the malady, overlook extremely important truths, core truths. And I too think hers is a very reasonable agenda. But I also believe that, just as the question in this nation long ago was was whether a slave owner could venture into a free state to retrieve his runaway “property” and not whether people ought to be property at all, so today we find ourselves debating not the real question – the gun culture – but whether police murders in the line of duty are committed disproportionately on one demographic. The presumptive nominee, exploiting the times, proceeds (figuratively) addressing the tines. Tiny solutions will be proffered when major and significant ones are impossible.
What if one billion dollars were spent on extra police training in the first year of the next president’s term? And what if we long afterward, when all the data on homicides and violent incidents have been collected and sedulously analyzed, determine statistically that this extra training actually saved a total of 200 lives over the course of four years (which is all special training can likely be calculated to influence… My CPR training has to be redone every two years!)? Do the math. That is five million dollars for every life saved. Surely, federal monies can be spent to save more than one life per $5 million. And here I’ve given a very large number, when the actual statistics might reveal that only 40 fewer deaths occurred. That would mean that $25 million was spent to save each life.
The foregoing is admittedly a very casuistic analysis, and it is far too complicated a matter to quibble about these numbers. Still, this much is unarguable: the vast majority of the nearly 30,000 murders in the U.S. each year are murders of and by people of the same race. Most murders of blacks are by other blacks, and whites mostly murder other whites. This is a very basic and well-substantiated statistical fact. And it is this way always. No one can point to a single year in all of American history where this was not so!
So why then are we spending so much thinking and so much time and money on the freakish exceptions? Well, if you happen to be an African-American, doubtless it does not seem so very “freaky” or “exceptional”! Secondly, political expediency always wins the day. As I remarked earlier in this essay, the candidate who suggested spending a whole billion dollars on these “police racism” issues will only gain more votes from this specific political offering; she won’t lose anything, on the whole, by including this in her political platform. A political aspirant will not necessarily offer something because he or she thinks it is “right” or helpful or fair or decent, but because he or she believes the idea will fly politically and his or her candidacy or career will be enhanced.
In all these three prominent shooting episodes (in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas, respectively) of the week ending July 9th both the killers and the killed were armed. And, sorry to enlighten you so abruptly, folks, but so long as this arming of everybody in the dynamic remains unchanged, no amount of police training is going to save us. We’ll save three lives at the same time we’re forlorn, impotent, paralyzed, crippled, nonplussed, confounded, thwarted, stymied, flummoxed, vexed, and defeated in the want and wish that we were able to save three thousand.
Political liberals detest any argument that focusses attention away from the pure race issue; we love our self-righteousness dearly. (And I am, you must know, if you’ve read all my posts here, an extremely liberal person!) And liberals also hate it when the writer or speaker is estimated to have insinuated that the men killed in each of the incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota were somehow partially to blame because they were armed. But we must not fear lucid arguments that save lives. In Minnesota, from all we could garner in the first 24 hours or so was that the driver, a lady in her late 20s, was pulled over by a cop on a routine stop for an unlit tail light. Her boyfriend was in the passenger seat next to her. His name was Philando Castile. Apparently Castile, aware that it was best to inform the officer about his weapon, and his license for the weapon, told the officer something like, “Officer I have a license to carry a weapon, and I am carrying a weapon.” It seems like it might be possible that the cop may have become agitated at hearing the word “weapon” and did not proceed cautiously, or that he simply misunderstood what Castile actually said.
Castile must have thought he was safer with the weapon. I wonder if he might have been wrong about that.
We must not – in linear, either-or fashion – claim that Castile was somehow utterly innocent or utterly guilty. He can have been totally innocent in his tragic death (as he was!), but ultimately at fault (as other tens of millions are equally!!!) for arming himself. We must not conflate the idea of wrongheadedness in arming oneself and the idea of being somehow culpable in one’s own demise. These aren’t the same thing! Let us make clear: CASTILE IS BLAMELESS IN HIS OWN KILLING! Nonetheless, I have always believed that all citizens of the public who own and/or carry firearms are stupid or unfortunate or both. We all agree with Barry on this point: Castile will always be counted among the unfortunates of the twenty-first century.
Statistics don’t lie. Statistics show that armed people are relatively more “unfortunate” in matters of premature death.
If humankind hypothetically survives into future centuries, it will be an infinitely fascinating study to examine how the United States government, with all its obvious interests in effectively combatting domestic and international terrorism, could not take a single legislative step in 2016 to stop known terror suspects from quickly and legally purchasing an assault weapon in the United States. And as I type these words, there is no reason to believe that a soon-to-be terrorist mass murderer is not in the United States legally buying an assault weapon. We see a government today reminiscent of the federal government in the years 1830 to 1860, unable to do anything substantial to stop slavery. The government does nothing to stop gun insanity, and less than two weeks after the complete failure of the United States Congress to offer even token measures against wildly imprudent (absent) gun “laws”, we have three very famous shooting incidents.
We will have a lot more!
But the problem with weapons is far more complex and entrenched than legislative solutions can effectively treat.
We must not, forefinger always at the metaphorical parapet and at the ready, look to “them”, and there identify the locus of all blameworthiness. If we are ever to realize our own liberation we must – with all intentness, earnestness and intelligent circumspection – look at what we are in every aspect, and what we can do. We need to employ our whole minds and hearts and bodies in the quest for justice, not only an inculpating (and by inference, exculpating) forefinger.
But I am just one lowly individual! What can I alone do? In so many respects, it is so much more satisfying to identify changes that need to be made out there, with those thousands, those millions. And isn’t it always with this kind of rationale that we all proceed? Aren’t we all, as Aristotle so sagaciously pointed out, political animals? And don’t we always oblige self-righteousness over self-examination?
I often wish that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had lived several more decades – not just because I like him personally and love his sincere spirituality and enlightened worldview, but because he might have given us such magnificent social leadership. And I often think, knowing how intellectually brilliant Dr. King was, that he would have arrived at the conclusion – maybe in the 1980s, maybe in the 1990s – that it was time to move on: it was time to stop employing our index fingers in an effort to locate and blame somebody out there for all our woes. Certainly Dr. King would have looked at the fact that the vast majority of African-American deaths by gun violence are from other African-American shooters, and he might have said, Enough! We need to unilaterally disarm ourselves! And we must do this as yet another sane and responsible effort to gain our own freedom.
For now, forget about “leadership”. Forget about what government is putatively supposed to do. These have proven completely ineffective. Let us instead consider the possibilities in enlightened unilateralism.
And wasn’t this the seminal genius of the Civil Rights Movement – deciding that it was time to act nonviolently and unilaterally? Wasn’t the famous bus boycott of 1954 proactive, nonviolent and unilateral? African-Americans did not wait for whites to join them in the boycott; they acted themselves. And they prevailed.
How are we to prevail against social injustices like racism in police shootings? How is such a goal even to attain the modest designation “realistic” when the population is armed to the teeth? When we are armed (as we are!!), the police will be too. And the laws of this universe are resolute and irresistible, and when two armed animals meet in an atmosphere of distrustful suspicion, as it will always be in a firearms-toting society of course, they are both, by the simple fact of each being armed, in greater danger of a lethal outcome. This is a commonsense truth, whether one likes it or not.
But, in a much wider sense, this circumstance between two such unwise and unlucky animals endangers the rest of us. And, even if we never cast our vote for guns and we never own guns, we suffer intense vulnerability in the ever-perilous stew of them.
Recall the crucial problem with slavery, the reason it was so difficult to extirpate? It was because it was lucrative. Once people started making money, it was impossible to get the genie back in the bottle.
Guns are different. The equivalent of the “profit” aspect with guns isn’t real profiting. It is rather a compelling illusion, the fantasy that one is actually profiting, the fantasy that one is safer when armed. Castile was one of countless millions of Americans who were sure their guns made them safer. In general, such people cannot be educated, dissuaded, persuaded, convinced, or disabused. They “know”; and theirs isn’t knowledge at all, but pure ideational-emotional conviction; they believe it, and cannot be made to believe otherwise. They can no more be persuaded that their guns make them less safe than a terrorist can be objectively persuaded that he’s a madman. I can’t give a damn whether it seems counterintuitive to any of my readers, but Castile became less safe when he armed himself. And so is everybody else. In the final analysis, we do not always believe things because they are patently true, but because we desperately, passionately, resolutely, religiously, ardently desire them to be true; and ours is a romantic swoon more than it is an observance of reality.
War will not settle this gun issue (the way it did with slavery). Legislative action will not resolve it either. The only real hope for American civilization lies in enlightened unilateralism.