Racial issues are intimately involved in the gun control issue, today as
much as ever before.
1. Most gun violence is committed by criminal gangs that tend to be
organized along ethnic minority lines. See the excellent TV series
Gangland
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangland_%28The_History_Channel%29> on the
History Channel. Legislators can't write statutes that allow
discrimination between gang members and ordinary citizens, so write them
with the expectation that they will be used as law enforcement tools
selectively against the most dangerous, which leaves it to the police to
engage in profiling that inevitably becomes racial.
2. Support for gun control legislation among minorities is hardly
uniform, but to the extent it appears, can be partially attributed to
negative opinions among minorities towards members of their own group,
or other minorities. There is nothing about racism that restricts it to
attitudes toward other groups than one's own. Some of the worse racism I
have seen is among Blacks toward other Blacks, and among Latinos toward
Blacks and other Latinos. Self-hatred is still hatred.
I attribute a major part of the problem to be in the ways the public is
educated about economics. Most get a rudimentary, and simplistic,
concept of supply and demand that enables them to conclude that if it
were just possible to reduce the general supply of weapons, then the
demand for them, remaining constant, would result in fewer people, the
responsible and irresponsible alike, getting and using them. That the
demand among the irresponsible might actually increase and cause even
more of the irresponsible to get and use them is not understood. What is
missing is an education in economics and sociology that imparts the
reality that economic and social systems are complex interacting
systems with many feedback loops that can cause a law against something
actually to cause more of it. *Counterintuitive Behavior of Social
Systems* <http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf>, by
Jay Forrester, should be required reading in the public schools.
-- Jon
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