America’s massive murder count is principally the result of handguns used in ordinary homicides–almost all of which occur in cities. As a result, despite a national conversation that focuses on other gun violence topics–mass shootings, rifle bans, background checks–the vast majority of American gun violence would be unaffected even if all those policies passed today. But there is a policy that does seem to substantially reduce gun violence. And it doesn’t involve banning guns. It’s called Ceasefire. And, unlike most gun control policies, the empirical evidence backing it is relatively clear that it works. What it does, in short, is identify likely perpetrators of gun violence and provide them a choice: intensive assistance and resources to escape from the cycle of violence, or harsh punishment.
So why aren’t approaches like Ceasefire the center of national conversation on gun violence, rather than the periphery (at best)?
The authors of the article in my ProPublica cite above posit that racism is a big reason. I think that’s part of it. We don’t talk about the daily slaughter and its solutions because black victims matter less in our society. Lots of people believe that the black victims of urban gun violence mostly choose a life of crime that leads to their violent death, or worse, that there’s something intractable about black culture that causes this.
Is that what keeps this discussion over saving thousands of lives below the fold while we wring our hands over (maybe) stopping dozens deaths a year with an assault weapons ban? Or is it something else?
The Black Lives Matter movement seems to care 10 times more about incidents where white people kill black people than incidents where black people kill black people.
The article only mentions racism once. I’m not sure that’s the gist of the article and not what I took away from it. I first heard about Ceasefire type activities from an NPR This American Life episode and it sounded both great and terrible at the same time.
It was great because it seemed to work. It was terrible because there was no focus on the moral hazard simply paying people to not commit crimes created.
To me the take away from the article is that the reason these types of efforts are not heavily pursued is because there is no constituency that advocates for it. The efforts are widely diffused, the results are slow to measure, and requires dedicated teams in many different locations.
Compare that with the conversation about Assault Weapon bans which is flashy, centralized, and can be done with the stroke of a pen. It’s easier to sell the NRA as a badguy than it is trying to get funding to give $1000 to the local drug pusher to stop committing crimes and get a job, even if the latter works and the former doesn’t.
What exactly do you think the thesis of the article is? Like when they talk about political will and the nation “listening,” in your reading what are they referring to?
Are you sure we’re talking about the same link? I’m talking about this one, titled “How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives.” It spends several paragraphs directly substantiating that claim, and many more indirectly doing so.
I think the moral hazard objection assumes that one can get oneself on “the list” to receive support at a cost less than the benefit of being there. I doubt that’s true.
But even if it is, if the policy works, is the moral hazard a problem?
That said, I think you’re right that “resources for potential criminals” is not the greatest political pitch ever. And yet, is it really more politically difficult than banning guns in America–a topic on which oceans of ink are spilled?
It would certainly seem that racism in a good part of it. But I think it’s more classism. The article says that 1/2 of street violence victims are black, but that means 1/2 aren’t black.
At any rate, our obsession with trying to prevent these lone wolf type attacks is blinding us to the fact that those victims are only a few % of the people dying from gun violence.
The article mentions the word “listen” twice in one paragraph. It was about using events to push a message, and not getting to choose when that is. Of course the article is discussing race and racial issues, I just didn’t read it as saying the CeaseFire method wasn’t widely adopted because the people who could do so were racists. I think it’s more nuanced than that.
Yes - the same article. I think it makes a good case that a potentially successful method isn’t being employed widely and how simultaneously a disproportionate number of black people are killed. Your OP is posing the question if the cause is racism. I don’t think the article goes that far to make that case.
I also think that it’s not politically tenable for politicians to say that to reduce gun crime we need to focus on young black men. That right there could open the Pol to criticisms of being racist. Obama may have been able to do this, but an old white guy saying they want to focus on young black men in dense urban environments would not play. I think that’s more likely than politicians willfully withholding dollars and support because they want the status quo of black men disproportionately being killed.
I don’t think it would be bad to try such a program. The inertia doesn’t seem to originate from racism though. Politicians act where they get votes. Do these people vote? If so are their votes actually in play?
I also hear and read that society doesn’t like government getting into the values business.
I think Americans are far more afraid to talk about income inequality AND do something about it. Plenty of people pay it lip service by railing against the rich or Wall Street, but not a lot of people will say income redistribution through higher taxes and more social services is the answer, when it in fact is a legitimate tactic to reduce the gap. Republicans who claim to be against it will talk about jobs from one side of the mouth while fighting to reduce millionaire taxes and create corporate loopholes from the other side at the same time.
What we need people to do and say is yes, we have welfare in this country, but that’s ok because no matter how much or how hard many poor people work, they cannot get out of their economical hole. So instead of telling them they should work more or harder, we’re going to give them money to help them out through reduced or eliminated income taxes, social services to help them out, and ensure they have a bargaining chip when it comes to dealing with management through strong unions, elimination of right-to-work laws, and fully paid sick and vacation days. But to too many people, some who these programs are actually designed to help, they think “socialism!” and their brain shuts down
I think racism is certainly part of the issue, but I think the reason something like your Ceasefire article is talking about is more a class issue. Think about it…you are talking about essentially paying people not to commit crimes. This is going to be fairly unpopular with a large swath of Americans, and it’s not going to be because of race alone…it’s going to be because Americans seem very reluctant to do stuff like this, even if it makes sense in a pure cost to benefits analysis. Look at the foot dragging on other similar social programs and you get an idea why, as referenced in your article, Biden seemed reluctant to pursue this course, while he’s happy to pursue courses with easy fixes such as purported gun bans and their effects on low probability events. I didn’t see anything about Sanders and how he took this, but he would probably be one would would take the risk on something like this, since it’s a very European solution to the problem.
Just my honest opinion, of course, but I think this falls into the category of something that might work but that Americans, or at least very large swaths of them, wouldn’t go for. It strikes too close to (to paraphrase) millions for defense but not a penny for tribute. I don’t think that this is because it’s a black or hispanic issue, I just think it’s a class and mentality issue. YMMV of course.
I don’t know that if affects your overall argument (that class also matters), but think the articles gets those numbers wrong. There are only 11,000-12,000 murders total, many of which don’t involve firearms. And while the firearm murder rate is still roughly split in the race of the victims, a much larger proportion of the white victims are women–wives and girlfriends, mostly–which strikes me as potentially needing a different solution from street crime. I think the proportion of black victims of firearm homicides not involving household members is a substantial majority of the total, to say nothing of how disproportionate that is.
I think you are using an overly simplistic view of racism. There a wide gap between “politicians willfully withholding dollars and support because they want the status quo of black men disproportionately being killed” and “racism, including the devaluing of black lives, is the primary driver of why there isn’t more discussion of this policy.”
I would guess that a majority of Americans believes that most black victims of gun violence are not as deserving of support and protection as the people killed in Orlando. Do you think that’s true?
(Incidentally, that view of the undeserving status of the victims is both cause of an effect of the epidemic of violence. The clearance rate of black murders is much lower than that for white murders, in part because fewer resources are spent solving them, in part because the victims are seen as less deserving. The lower clearance rate for murder leads to more vigilante justice, a correlation seen all across the globe.)
Eligible African-Americans register and vote at higher rates than all other ethnic groups.
Which is why Velocity’s post was not anything like a hijack - BLM and groups like it are going to be fine with the enhanced social services part of Ceasefire, but are going to throw themselves into spasms at the idea of the flip side also mentioned - the harsh punishment part.
I think the core problem is bigger than guns or racism. I’m fairly well convinced at this point that the criminal system in America is driven entirely on emotion and that we have virtually zero interest in evidence. Bad people did bad things and need to be punished. If we just send enough people to jail, no one else will ever be raped or murdered again. You see the same thing in immigration - amnesty gets very little support because of a purely emotional reaction: “we can’t reward criminal behavior.” (But, of course, the alternatives to amnesty are all fantasy.) Remember the reaction when we tried to help drug users avoid hep C and AIDS - “we can’t reward criminal behavior.” You see it any time someone suggests jails could offer some kind of rehabilitation, education, etc. Someone in my office on Friday said “I can’t believe the government pays money to get people off of drugs. They should be in jail!”
That’s the real problem more than race or anything else. We don’t care about what works because we do all our voting on the issue through the lens of fear and vengeance. All bad things must be punished, period, end of discussion. There’s no room for trivial things like facts.
These attitudes are often thought of as right-wing attitudes, but look at the Democratic Presidential candidates this cycle. Hillary was indirectly taking credit for the crime bills of the 90s (right up until she apologized for them without proposing any specific plan to change them) and O’Malley was on the map thanks to his tough stance on crime as a mayor. Sanders wants to make sure we’re putting Wall Street in jail too. The only thing Americans have broad consensus on is that bad people need to be punished. More of them, more often, more severely.
I agree with that, but I feel the same way about that as I do explanation that point to class, which is that I think they are inextricably tied to race. If you trace the origins of the “tough on crime” rhetoric you mention, they get pretty racist.
By contrast, when we have a white drug epidemic like the current opiate epidemic, what you see is skyrocketing support for expensive medical intervention, needle exchange, and criminal justice alternatives.
So I think it’s really hard to disentangle race from the attitude you cite. But I agree that a lack of evidence-based policymaking in criminal justice is a huge problem, and it is separate from (even if intertwined with) racism.
I am using a simplistic view. I’m generally opposed to having a giant umbrella of racism in which many actions regarding race fall under it. Those two statements are different, but I don’t know the extent of which you are classifying as racism. For example, if the black vote was a sufficiently low enough figure where it couldn’t turn an election either way, is it racist to spend less time focusing on issues important to the black community, or is that pragmatic? There was a thread in Elections about the Asian vote and basically they don’t matter in terms of electoral politics. I don’t think ignoring Asians in this manner is racist more than it is pragmatic.
I acknowledge the facts about clearance rates, crime victimization, etc. I’m not yet there on categorizing these as the result of racism.
It may be - I don’t know. I think the Orlando events are more sensational and garner support in that manner. I don’t think there is much feeling of support for victims who have themselves engaged in criminal behavior.
OK. And it’s not like race and class aren’t intertwined in many ways, but I think the issue is that middle class people aren’t the usual victims of street violence, but they are the victims when it’s some nutcase shooting up a movie theater or a kids’ school in CT. So, yeah, the US has an unprecedented level of gun murders considering how rich the country is, but it’s a problem of the lower class and the outlaw class, and so people aren’t all up in arms about it (pun intended), as they are about something like Sandy Hook.