A MINORITY VIEW
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2013
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Cultural Deviancy, Not Guns
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*********** There’s a story told about a Paris chief of police who was
called to a department store to stop a burglary in progress. Upon his
arrival, he reconnoitered the situation and ordered his men to surround
the entrances of the building next door. When questioned about his
actions, he replied that he didn’t have enough men to cover the
department store’s many entrances but he did have enough for the
building next door. Let’s see whether there are similarities between his
strategy and today’s gun control strategy.
*********** Last year, Chicago had 512 homicides; Detroit had 411;
Philadelphia had 331; and Baltimore had 215. Those cities are joined by
other dangerous cities -- such as St. Louis, Memphis, Tenn., Flint,
Mich., and Camden, N.J. -- and they also lead the nation in shootings,
assaults, rapes and robberies. Both the populations of those cities and
their crime victims are predominantly black. Each year, more than 7,000
blacks are murdered. Close to 100 percent of the time, the murderer is
another black person.
*********** According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976
and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Though blacks are 13
percent of the nation’s population, they account for more than 50
percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide
victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it's
22 times that of whites. Coupled with being most of the nation’s
homicide victims, blacks are also most of the victims of violent
personal crimes, such as assault and robbery. The magnitude of this
tragedy can be seen in another light. According to a Tuskegee Normal and
Industrial Institute study, between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were
lynched at the hands of whites.
*********** What percentage of murders, irrespective of race, are
committed with what are being called assault weapons? You’d be hard put
to come up with an amount greater than 1 or 2 percent. In fact,
according to FBI data from 2011, there were 323 murders committed with a
rifle of any kind but 496 murders committed with a hammer or a club.
But people who want to weaken our Second Amendment guarantees employ a
strategy like that of the Paris chief of police. They can’t do much
about hammers, clubs, fists or pistols, but by exploiting public
ignorance, they might have a bit of success getting an “assault weapon”
ban that will have little impact on violent crime.
*********** There are other measures these people employ in an attempt
to end violence that border on lunacy. Massachusetts’ Hyannis West
Elementary recently warned a 5-year-old’s parents that if their son made
another gun from a Legos set, he’d be suspended. Elementary-school
children have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for drawing a
picture of a gun or pointing a finger and saying, “Bang, bang.” I
shudder to think about what would happen to kids in a schoolyard if they
played, as I played nearly 70 years ago, “cops 'n’ robbers” or “cowboys
'n’ Indians.” Maybe today’s politically correct educators would cut the
kids a bit of slack if they said they were playing “cowboys 'n’ Native
Americans.”
*********** What explains a lot of what we see today, which politicians
and their liberal allies would never condemn, is growing cultural
deviancy. Twenty-nine percent of white children, 53 percent of Hispanics
and 73 percent of black children are born to unmarried women. The
absence of a husband and father from the home is a strong contributing
factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional
disturbance and a host of other social problems. By the way, the low
marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data show that a
slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults
from 1890 to 1940. In 2009, the poverty rate among married whites was
3.2 percent; for blacks, it was 7 percent, and for Hispanics, it was
13.2 percent. The higher poverty rates -- 22 percent for whites, 35.6
percent for blacks and 37.9 percent for Hispanics -- are among unmarried
families.
*********** Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the kind of
music accepted today that advocates killing and rape and other vile
acts. Punishment for criminal behavior is lax. Today’s Americans accept
behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.
*********** Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George
Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read
features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.