I certainly agree that much gun violence is committed by criminal
gangs that tend to be organized along ethnic minority lines -- but is
there some study that reports that *most* gun violence is so committed?
Thanks,
Eugene
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jon Roland
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2008 2:18 PM
To: Greg Jacobs; Firearms Reg
Subject: Re: Heller case's resultant racial issues?
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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