When President Biden launched what he called the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, he adopted one of the key assertions of the gun control movement: our nation’s gun-related crime problem is an “epidemic” that must be solved by more gun control. But if “gun violence” is an epidemic, then it’s certainly not one felt equally by the whole population.
By Kostas Moros for Shooting News Weekly; Cover image courtesy Washington Post
Of course, there is no doubt people of all races have been murdered with guns. Similarly, the scourge of mass shootings, while still a statistically very unlikely threat, hasn’t discriminated in who it harms when such crimes happen. There is also no doubt that far too many Americans succumb to suicide, a large proportion of which are completed with firearms.
But when it comes to what most people mean when they say “gun violence”—violent crimes committed by a person (or people) against another person (or people) using firearms—there’s simply no way to beat around the bush: Black Americans are far and away the most affected, and it isn’t even close. Addressing the root causes of why is the riddle we must solve as a country. But to do so, we first have to identify the problem with as much specificity as possible while rejecting those who actively try to shut down this debate.
A general overview of the intersection of homicide and race…according to the CDC
Looking at the CDC’s 2023 provisional data and sorting homicide victims by race reveals a startling picture. While non-Hispanic white and Asian Americans have overall homicide rates of 2.8 per 100,000 and 1.7 per 100,000 respectively, Black Americans are at 28.6 per 100,000. That’s significantly higher than other groups as well, including white Hispanics (7.1 per 100,000), and native Americans (13.6 per 100,000).
Comparing these rates internationally, it’s as if white and Asian Americans are living in Eastern Europe, while Black Americans are living in a long-troubled narco-state like Honduras.
It’s also important to note here that while the CDC gives us only victim data and not offender data, the overwhelming majority of homicide is intra-racial. That is, homicides are usually committed by someone of the same race as the victim.
For instance, in 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 81% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 89% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders. For the purposes of this discussion, then, it’s safe to assume that a given homicide victim was killed by someone of their own race, and therefore to use the race of the victim as a proxy for the race of the likely offender.
Gun-related homicide follows a similar pattern as general homicide, and that applies at the state level too.
Narrowing the focus down to gun-related homicide specifically, the CDC tells us that Black Americans were killed using guns at a rate of 24.6 per 100,000 in 2023, compared to just 1.8 per 100,000 for white Americans and 1.0 per 100,000 for Asian Americans.
Frankly, any discussion of gun-related violent crime that doesn’t put the plight of the Black community front and center is a fundamentally ignorant or dishonest discussion. The fact of the matter is, for most Americans, there is just not a very high threat of being killed by a gun-wielding criminal. But for Black Americans, it’s a very real threat. This is despite the fact that white Americans are by far the most likely to personally own a gun, with their rate of gun ownership being about 50% higher than that of Blacks.
This isn’t only seen on a national level. Within states, the disparity can be just as dramatic. For example, Louisiana frequently tops the chart for homicide (and gun-related homicide), leading it to be a regular target of derision by gun control groups. Yet for the majority of the state’s residents, who are white, gun-related homicide isn’t a major threat.
Of the state’s 2,652,879 white residents, 89 were killed in a gun-related homicide in 2023, a rate of 3.4 per 100,000. But black residents, a population 1,477,731, suffered 626 gun-related homicides. A shocking rate of 42.4 per 100,000, or roughly twelve times higher than that of white Louisianans.
In essence, the south’s generally much higher homicide rates are not due to the region’s generally permissive gun laws, but rather because southern states tend to have far more Black residents, the demographic that suffers (and inflicts) the most homicides per capita. This is why Louisiana and Idaho can have similarly permissive gun laws, but dramatically different homicide rates. Or on the flip side, why Maryland and Massachusetts can have similarly strict gun laws, but again, find themselves on the opposite ends of the homicide rate spectrum.
Sometimes the comparison is even more stark. Texas is right next to Louisiana and is also a pro-gun state, but has a much lower gun-related homicide rate, as the map below demonstrates.
Digging deeper to better identify the challenge.
Believe it or not, the numbers get even more shocking from here. It isn’t as if all Black men and women of every age suffer equally high gun-related homicide rates. While Black women are homicide victims at higher rates than women of other races, they are below that of Black men by a very wide margin.
So if we’re going to begin to solve this problem, the focus must be on Black men. But even that isn’t specific enough. We need to identify the exact age groups where the problem arises most. When we drill down even further, we see perhaps the most shocking statistic of all: Black men (some of them still teenage boys) in the 15 to 24 age group, have a gun-related homicide rate of 100 per 100,000 in 2023. In other words, if you are a 15 to 24-year-old black male, you had a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed in a gun-related homicide in 2023.
To be sure, all young males tend to be more violent than older men (and women). But there simply is no comparison racially…white Americans in the 15 to 24-year-old age group have a gun-related homicide rate of 3.4 per 100,000, with Asian American males a bit below that. That’s more than an order of magnitude lower than the rate of black men and boys. And while Hispanic American men also have an elevated rate of gun-related homicide at 18.3 per 100,000, it’s still more than five times lower that of their Black counterparts.
In sum, if we are ever going to significantly reduce America’s homicide rate, the solutions have to focus heavily—perhaps almost exclusively—on treating the violence crisis faced by young Black males. Anyone who dodges this problem or pretends this is about “general” gun violence, doesn’t comprehend the scope of the disparity.
That, or they’re trying to mislead you.
How debate on this issue is toxically shut down
Given this problem is so critical and so clearly focused, why is it so hard for anyone who isn’t a Black American to talk about it? I speak from experience on this, as I find myself taking a deep breath before I ever attempt to contribute to this discussion, asking myself whether I really want to dive into these perilous waters. So for this section of the article, I will shift away from statistics and provide my own personal experience and opinions.
In my view, there are two main types of people who seek to shut down this debate:
The first group is comprised of those who are openly racist against Blacks. You will likely see some examples (but hopefully not too many) in the comments below. This group loves the confirmation of their prejudices that the homicide data provides them, arguing as they do that Black Americans are allegedly inferior and irredeemably more violent by their very nature.
They have turned these statistics into a meme of sorts, such as “13/52” or “13 does 52” (a reference to the fact that blacks make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population, but are responsible for committing over half of all homicides). They don’t care that even with elevated homicide rates, the overwhelming majority of Black Americans obviously aren’t violent killers and just want to live in peace like the rest of us.
While one option is to just ignore them, the problem is that the racist contingent has so overtaken this topic that it has “poisoned the well” for serious discussion focused on identifying the particular issues and solutions. When you raise this topic at all you often get called racist regardless of your good intentions, thanks to the damage the racist contingent has done to the discussion. This has happened to me more than once (and may again in the comments or quote-tweets for this article).
The second group are people who reflexively call anyone who raises this topic “racist” in order to shut down any discussion of it. Undoubtedly, some of the people who react that way are understandably upset by the racist contingent (above) and assume everyone who raises similar-sounding talking points is also just being racist. Theirs is an emotional response, but not a malicious one.
But another sub-group is far more nefarious. They shut down the debate by calling you racist because the discussion hurts their political agenda.
It’s no secret that when it comes to the most violent cities in America, there is something else they frequently have in common besides large Black populations. They are almost exclusively run by the Democrat party and have been for many decades. Baltimore. St. Louis. Philadelphia. Kansas City. New Orleans. Chicago. The list goes on and on, and you will be hard-pressed to find a Republican mayor among the lot of them.
The sky-high homicide rates suffered by Black Americans are an indictment of the failed leadership of Democrats who have had full control of our most problematic cities for generations. This is a massive point of insecurity for their partisan supporters, so the best way to deal with such a damning debate is to shut it down immediately by labeling anyone who talks about it as racist.
Similarly, gun control advocates also want to stifle this discussion because it obliterates their core argument. If the gun-related homicide problem is correlated heavily with race–but not with the degree or number of gun laws in a state – then gun control is demonstrably a colossal failure in stopping homicide. We’ve seen this play out in reality, as no amount of gun control laws that have been passed have solved the homicide problems in Baltimore or Chicago, both of which are in top-rated gun control states. (Maryland is ranked by Everytown as the eighth best state for gun control, Illinois ranked third).
More tragically, their misguided efforts mean that millions of law-abiding Black Americans have a much harder time exercising their Second Amendment rights, even though they’re precisely the people most likely to need access to effective armed self-defense in the dangerous cities where they often live.
Solutions
This article is primarily about openly identifying the problem of the racial disparity in gun-related homicide and explaining the reasons why this discussion is so hard to have in a constructive way. I don’t pretend to know what all of the solutions are and it would be arrogant to think I did. The Black community will need to be the first to speak up for itself and break the cycle.
But there are some obvious places to start. For one, the Black family must be restored. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Black kids are far more likely to be raised by single mothers than children of other races. Despite their best efforts, solo parents often just can’t keep up. It’s hard to make sure your teenage son is staying away from gangs and drugs when you have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Growing up in a two-parent household is correlated with lifetime success in many ways, and one of those is far less exposure to the criminal element. Even in unsafe neighborhoods, children are far safer when they’re raised by both parents, particularly if those parents are married.
Opportunity is also critical. Teenage boys and young men who feel they don’t have a chance to get ahead are understandably more likely to fall into gangs, drugs, and eventually gun-related crime. But our schools in so many predominantly Black areas are a national embarrassment. For example, while Chicago schools spend ever-increasing amounts of money, test scores remain dismal.
Considering that some additional money spent comes from the federal government, a federal investigation is warranted to find out how exactly it’s possible for a doubling of spending in the last decade to result in a roughly 70% decline in proficiency. Perhaps it’s the fact that a large share of that money doesn’t ever make it to the students.
As a recent article argued . . .
Here’s one fact Chicagoans should know as the Chicago Teachers Union demands billions more for its massive labor contract: only half of the $10 billion spent at CPS each year makes it to classrooms and instruction. The other $5 billion goes to fund a sprawling bureaucracy of near-empty to half-empty schools, an increasingly bloated administrative staff and ever more debt, driven largely by pensions. All to the union’s benefit.
I don’t mean to pick on Chicago, as these patterns are seen in other cities too. Proper education is one major way to reduce the likelihood of future criminality, as studies have long shown.
To make the dramatic policy shifts necessary, political change is likely needed. Clearly, Black Americans being the most-loyal Democrat voters hasn’t resulted in these issues being solved despite having had generations to do so. For anything to change, Black voters must be willing to fire failed leadership or we are all just wasting our time.
This last election showed some indications of that beginning to happen, but there’s a long way to go. This doesn’t necessarily mean only Republicans need participate in these efforts. Democrats who are truly willing to buck their party leadership and affiliation in failed cities would be welcome as well.
Conclusion
I hope that in his second term, President Trump treats this problem as the high priority it should be and that state and local leaders will as well. Lives are being cut short at shocking rates, particularly among young Black men and I refuse to accept that as an unchangeable fact of life. We can do better than the platitudes and failed policies of the past. I’ve identified a couple of possible root causes, but many more undoubtedly exist and should be fully explored.
Thank you for reading this far into an article about a difficult topic. Please comment below with any constructive ideas you have and further this discussion in a constructive way.
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by SNW from a tweet posted by Konstadinos Moros.
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Thoughtful analysts. The organization known as Black Lives Matter should concern itself a bit with reducing gang activity and protecting law abiding black folks, and less with protecting hoodlums, and the relatively few cases of police violence. And., yes, the American family must be restored. That alone will produce less poverty, more discipline, and more solid values.
Synopsizing your article: Parenting and schools.
BUT Dems want a Race War & divide since 1969+
Race. What a crock. It’s never been about race, ever. There is only one race, the Human Race. Different cultures, different languages and different shades of brown from dark to light. It’s about sin filled hearts, not race. Skin color comes from the amount of melanin in the skin which not one of us can change or have a say in.
We need a separation of school and state.
VOUCHERS
Wake up America. Our gun violence issue is minor compared to the black violence problem we have.
I can appreciate this treatise about “race,” and the bias of gun violence among minorities. However, there are two factors not being addressed; 1) A single minority reaps more government entitlements, as opposed to a married couple. 2) This one can be applied to mass shooters of any race; the plethora of drugs that cause thoughts of suicide. I specifically typed in my browser, “list of drugs that cause thoughts of suicide,” and found a list of 230 drugs. Therefore, in light of this fact, guns were never the cause of mass shootings. We must test all mass shooters of every available drug that causes “thoughts of suicide.” Mind you, the recent shooter in Memphis was not tested for any drug that causes thoughts of suicide, purposely, to maintain the narrative that guns are the cause of gun violence. Yes, I am calling that medical examiner corrupt.
Excellent article. This is the first article I’ve seen pinpointing that race has a lot to do with homicide rates.