These Are the States That Have ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws

(TakePart)  A Nevada murder trial is renewing the debate over America’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense laws.

The story begins in February, when Cody Devine, 34, and Janai Wilson, 29, apparently went, without permission, to a vacant rental property near Reno, Nevada, owned by Wayne Burgarello. According to prosecutors, Burgarello, 73, found Devine and Wilson resting on a floor. He shot them. Burgarello maintains he was acting in self-defense under Nevada’s Stand Your Ground law.

The case is an important reminder about the debate over the controversial laws. Thirty-three states have adopted some form of Stand Your Ground law, according to the American Bar Association. Ten states have introduced bills to repeal or scale back their Stand Your Ground laws this year, and 13 states have pending legislation to strengthen or enact such laws.

The LaQuan McDonald killing and the problem of criminal police

(theGrio)  What happens when the police are the criminals?

The city of Chicago settled with the family of LaQuan McDonald for $5 million, in connection with the October 20, 2014, fatal shooting of the 17-year-old by a police officer. Johnson was shot 16 times, including nine times in the back, and a total of six police officers have been named in connection with the cover up.

Despite news of this settlement, LaQuan’s family will never be made whole, because nothing can replace the loss of one’s child. And we still need to hear more about the police deleting 86 minutes of a surveillance video of the incident from a nearby Burger King. The feds are investigating the killing, as they should, but the investigation, trial and conviction, if any, will not resolve this fundamental question: Why are the police allowed to harbor criminals in their midst?

Baltimore’s deadliest month should be as big of a story as Freddie Gray

(theGrio)  The city of Baltimore has reached a tragic milestone, as May became its deadliest month in over four decades. Last month, Baltimore experienced 43 homicides, and the city has not seen these numbers since December 1971, when 44 were killed. This news should receive as much attention as the police killing of Freddie Gray, correct? If not, then why not?

The news comes as former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, also former mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007, announced his bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy. In a perfect example of bad timing, O’Malley has come under fire by community activists for installing “zero tolerance” policing and “broken windows” policies as mayor, as well as a data-tracking management tool called CityStat, all of which facilitated a sharp rise in arrests of black people during his tenure.

Condemning police violence doesn’t mean we don’t care about other violence

(theGrio)  We pay lots of attention when police kill unarmed black people — and we should — but do we care as much when black people kill each other?

We do, and it is ok to care about both at the same time.

In a damning report on the Cleveland Police Department, the U.S. Department of Justice takes that city’s police force to task for its excessive, unnecessary and unreasonable use of deadly force. The cops in Cleveland, according to the DOJ, shoot at people who pose no threat, brutalize unarmed people and misuse stun guns. Meanwhile, the CPD has agreed to accept federal oversight and limits on how and when their officers are able to use force.

Ohio wants guns in church and daycare, and why my car was riddled with bullets

This week I have two companion pieces on the issue of gun violence.  First, in theGrio, my commentary on bills introduced in the Ohio legislature which would replicate Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, and permit guns in churches, daycare and schools (link).  It sounds like satire, but I couldn't make this up if I tried.

Finally, check out my piece in Huffington Post (here) and Black Commentator (here) on my personal experience with gun violence last week in Philadelphia.

Violence Begets Violence in America

So, what do you make of a country where a third grader brings a gun to school to ward off bullies?

In Inkster, Michigan an 8-year old boy brought a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun to his elementary school two days in a row for protection, and to scare off three girls who were bullying him. The weapon was in the boy’s backpack and belonged to a relative. And surely somewhere in this nation of unacceptable levels of violence and gun worship, there are those who think that is a good thing, to arm children to protect themselves. More guns will make us all safer, right?

After the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, America, it seems, is waking up to the need to stem the tide of violence in this country. But there is nothing new here. Whether we look at the shooting sprees and mass murder of young white men in the affluent suburbs or rural areas, or the epidemic of gun violence in communities of color in Chicago and elsewhere, violence is part of the fabric of America. 

From the beginning, this country has used violence to solve its problems. Years of dehumanization of others will do that to you. And this was always the case, from the enslavement of Africans to the genocide of the indigenous population, and from the regime of lynching in the Jim Crow South and elsewhere, to the acts of terror waged against civil rights workers, antiwar protestors and organized labor.

Speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1967, Martin Luther King said “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” Dr. King’s words are even more relevant today than when he spoke over four decades ago.

The U.S. has the most powerful army, accounting for 58 percent of the military expenditures made by the top 10 military powers. With high gun accessibility and the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, America leads in deadly gun violence. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. homicides are committed with guns, and 70 percent of the weapons seized in drug war-ravaged Mexico are traced back to the U.S. Gun proliferation is bolstered by an anachronistic and obsolete Second Amendment, and promoted by gun manufacturers, who bribe lawmakers and hold the public hostage in the process.

Further, America’s love affair with violence extends to its overly-punitive, disproportionate system of justice. With one quarter of the world’s prisoners, the U.S. is the largest jailer in the world. Prisons are the largest repository for the mentally ill, with more people receiving mental health treatment behind bars than in hospitals or treatment centers. As budgets for education and social services are slashed and jobs are scarce, the American way is to lock up and even kill our perceived problems rather than to build up people and rehabilitate them.

Moreover, our continued reliance on the death penalty in the U.S. is a prime example of what happens when a society perpetuates a vicious circle of violence. While capital punishment was long cast aside in Europe,Canada, Australia and elsewhere, the barbaric practice still finds a welcome home in America - at least for now. The U.S. is part of an unsavory alliance of nations who lead the world in executions - including China, Iran,Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. But the winds of change are blowing.

For a nation conditioned by violence, it is hard to break extremely old and equally bad habits. After all, people are comfortable with what they know, comfortable with what they were raised on. America can break the cycle of violence - however normalized it has become - and yet it must if it wants to break from its troubling past and become better than it was.

America Is the Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today

February is Black History Month, and a perfect time to reflect on the nonviolence and antiwar stance of Dr. Martin Luther King. Recently, my colleague Mark Thompson reminded me of an important Dr. King quote when I appeared on his radio show on SIRIUS XM to discuss the Tucson shooting. It was a speech the slain civil rights leader gave at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, a year and a day before he was assassinated.

In the speech King was discussing the conversations he had with angry and desperate young black men in the northern ghettos. He tried to convince them that nonviolent action, not rifles or Molotov cocktails, would solve their problems and bring social change. "But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted," King said. "Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government." King said he could not be silent, so he broke that silence and spoke out against the Vietnam War, most likely to his peril.

And although he uttered these words 44 years ago in a different era about a war that ended decades ago, his words are as relevant and clear as if he just spoke yesterday. America is the greatest purveyor of violence around. You only need look at the latest shootout massacre du jour on U.S. soil. These perennial bloodbaths occur so frequently that Americans have accepted them as a part of daily life, the price of doing business, as they say.

With 90 guns for every 100 people and 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey in Switzerland, the U.S. by far is the most heavily armed nation in the world. Yemen, in second place, has 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, and Iraq with 39.

And not surprisingly, America has the world's highest gun-related death rate, with nearly 100,000 people shot or killed with a gun each year. Over a million Americans have been killed with guns since King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, according to the Childrens' Defense Fund. Moreover, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says that America's homicide rate is 6.9 times higher than rates in other 22 advanced nations combined. And among 23 high-income countries, 80 percent of firearms deaths occur in the U.S.

This is a travesty and an embarrassment in the industrialized world. And with guns aplenty in a nation that is hungry, ill and need of repair, guns are ready available for the mentally unstable, domestic abusers, criminals and others who should be prohibited from having a gun. But what do you do when the county itself is sick? As Michael Moore recently noted on Twitter, "Tons o guns & unstable people all over world but they don't kill each other like we do. Guns Don't Kill People. Americans Kill People. Why?"

The Second Amendment -- an anachronism that was meaningful only when people hunted for their food -- reads, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." It is hard to believe, but the gun lobby and right-wing militia groups who would wage violence against the government have interpreted this to apply to an unlimited right for individual citizens, the right to amass a personal army. The weapons makers pay politicians millions of dollars to back it up. Unfortunately a right-wing Supreme Court tends to agree.

As other countries distinguish themselves as leaders in green technology and high-speed rail, the U.S. is the leader in guns. And we export our violence abroad. U.S.-made guns are fueling the carnage among drug gangs in Mexico. U.S. Army Reserve Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr., convicted in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq, was a prison guard in Pennsylvania, where he was accused of beating and kicking prisoners and putting razorblades in their food.

The teargas canisters that the Egyptian police used against the Cairo protesters in Tahrir Square were made in Jamestown, Pennsylvania. Egypt's military hardware was made in the U.S.A., because the American government props up Egypt's petty dictator Hosni Mubarak to the tune of over $1.3 billion a year. And apparently he pockets that money, given that he has become a billionaire through "public service." Yet, his people protest their poverty, rising food prices, and a level of economic inequality that could someday become as bad as that of the U.S. Further, Mubarak's new handpicked hack vice president Omar Suleiman was the torture and renditions liaison for the CIA. Now, Suleiman has been charged with investigating the hoodlums that Mubarak unleashed on the nonviolent protesters in the Cairo streets.

President Obama finds himself in a quandary, as someone who admires King's words and philosophy, yet is also the head of the American empire. Both men received a Nobel Peace Prize, but only one of them earned his. The other received his in good faith -- as a down payment on prospective achievements, if you will -- while inheriting two pointless wars from his warmonger predecessor that he can't seem to shake off. Still, you could see hints of King coming out of Obama when he essentially told Mubarak that his time in office is up. And yet, the president backtracked and toned it down. The U.S. is addicted to empire, spending over half of its discretionary budget on war, and nearly half of the world's military expenditures. We fund dictators, tyrants and potentates to do our bidding, to keep an illusory Cold War peace, as we preach democracy and export fast food. Meanwhile, China, a huge, authoritarian country, spends one-sixth as much as the U.S. on its military, but twice as much on clean energy technology.

But Americans, at least we have our guns, right? Yeah, right.

Harvard Murder Highlights the Perils of Being Young, Gifted and Black

On March 16, former Harvard student Brittany Smith was indicted for her alleged involvement in a campus shooting that left a man dead.

Smith was charged with being an accessory after the fact in the May 2009 murder of 21-year old Justin Cosby. Specifically, Smith is accused of participating in a drug deal gone bad, of giving three New York men--including her boyfriend--access to her Harvard ID swipe card, which gained them access to her Kirkland House dorm. The men allegedly robbed and shot Cosby, who is linked to the campus drug trade and died the next day. Smith allegedly hid the murder weapon, helped the men escape, and lied to a grand jury. In other words, she's in a heap of trouble. And while the accused are innocent until proven guilty, she deserves little of your sympathy if all of this is true. But that doesn't mean that we cannot mourn ruined lives, and the loss that is associated with broken dreams unfulfilled expectations.

Smith and another Harvard student linked to the incident, Chanequa Campbell, were banished from the college and not allowed to graduate. Campbell, who has not been charged, came short of accusing Harvard of racism. "The honest answer to that is that I'm black and I'm poor and I'm from New York and I walk a certain way and I keep my clothes a certain way," Campbell told the Boston Globe, in response to a question about Harvard's reason for ordering her to leave. "It's something that labels me as different from everyone else."

To be sure, Campbell and Smith did not receive the support from black folks on campus that Professor Henry Louis Gates enjoyed after his incident. Of course, I speak of Gates' altercation with a Cambridge police officer as the scholar tried to enter his home. But then again, Gates had done nothing wrong except "break into" his own house while black. The students' alleged association with the campus drug trade, and their apparent involvement in the incident in question, resulted in the murder of a young man on campus. It is not my goal to prosecute this case in this commentary, nor can I assess whether race played any role in this case. But I do know that cries of racism ring hollow here. Drugs are no stranger to Harvard or any other university, and while Harvard students have experimented with drugs for years, never did it result in a drug-related murder.

The lesson learned here is to mind the company you keep. This goes for African American students, and anyone else for that matter.

The fall from grace of these two Harvard students, these young black women with faded promise, reminds me of Edmund Perry. In 1985, 17-year old Perry, a Harlem native and then-recent graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy who was about to enroll in Stanford, was shot to death by a plainclothes police officer. Witnesses claimed Perry and his brother, a Cornell engineering student, tried to mug the officer. It just so happens that Eddie, who decried his prep school's racism and "adopted a street-savvy swagger to mask his own insecurities", was dealing drugs at Exeter. White folk with something other than good intentions tried to use this incident to prove the argument that, you can dust them off, dress them up and school them as you may, but "these" people are beyond our help.

And in 1994, 24 year old Kemba Smith pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute crack, and was sentenced to 24.5 years. Her case was a true travesty, and put the spotlight on America's harsh, draconian and disproportionate drug sentencing laws. Her true crime was having an abusive drug dealer boyfriend, a guy she met as a student at Hampton University in Virginia. Smith described herself as someone who grew up in a sheltered middle-class existence, and hung out with the wrong crowd at school. Fortunately President Clinton pardoned her after she served six years, and she can use her second chance in life to teach others.

These cases are blatantly vivid reminders that young people, in this case African-American, lead fragile lives. Even for those who appear to be gliding on a road to success, that road is precarious and fraught with danger. There are negative influences and the corrosive effects of peer pressure. Black kids are ridiculed by their classmates for trying to act white, as if being intelligent, scholarly and gifted are incompatible (rather than synonymous) with blackness. College-bound students of color have a hard time of it, often with little support even from family, and incurring the resentment of a community short on opportunities. Some young people cannot reconcile their personal aspirations with their desire to "keep it real" and stay true to their community. Perhaps they can't take the pressure of navigating two worlds, and the culture shock it entails. Perhaps in this materialistic society, they lack grounding, whether social, political or spiritual, and they eke out an existence feeding on media stereotypes. Maybe we are all to blame for not properly imbuing children with more character-building, positive influences. Maybe they just aren't comfortable living in their own black skin.

This is not to make excuses for those who seem to have so much, yet waste it all. After all, many people have soared high with much less to work with, while others seem to squander their opportunities and fall so far, so hard and so fast. Certainly it is not as simple as a case of black youth gone bad, of rotten criminals getting what they deserve. Nor is it as simple as a case of racial victimization. I don't think the civil rights movement fought for the right of black students to get caught up in the campus drug game, with dead bodies strewn along their path. But one thing is certain: we must learn from the Chanequa Campbells, the Brittany Smiths, the Kemba Smiths and the Edmund Perrys. We must learn what can go wrong when you are young, gifted and black.

Our Sick Society Normalizes Gun Violence

From BlackCommentator.com and The Huffington Post:



Sadly, it's the sort of thing that happens on a regular basis these days.

Someone, whether a disgruntled employee, a mentally unstable individual, a socially-awkward or obsessive person, you fill in the blank, goes on a shooting spree and exacts vengeance through the barrel of a gun. People express shock that this sort of thing could happen where they live, in the safe environs far from the nation's notoriously crime-ridden inner cities. Some will claim there were no indications the shooting suspect was capable of such violence. Meanwhile, others will insist "there was always something off" about the person. In any case, after the obligatory media coverage and perfunctory surface-level discussions, after the memorials are held, the grief counselors are dispatched and the victims are buried, things generally go back to normal. All is forgotten, that is, until the next tragic shooting that leaves x number of people dead and y number of people injured.

It was said that Amy Bishop, that biology professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, was angry because she had been denied tenure by the university. She supposedly visited a shooting range before her shooting rampage. And she was obsessed with President Obama. We also know that she shot her brother to death years earlier in what was ruled as an accidental killing, and she was a suspect in an attempted pipe bombing of her professor at Harvard.

There are questions that are beyond the scope of this commentary, but deserve some mention nonetheless. We know that the three victims who died, allegedly at her hand, were faculty of color. Was this deliberate? Certainly there is a story hidden in there, somewhere. Had Amy Bishop been a person of color herself -- perhaps an African-American, or a Muslim with an Arab surname -- would she have eluded the institutional screeners and gatekeepers for so long, given her sketchy past? Was she given a pass because she is white, despite her issues? Perhaps for some, these are insensitive questions to ask at this time, or any other time for that matter, but ask I must.

Oddly and consistently, such questions are always raised after the fact. You never hear of a shooting rampage that was thwarted, with the perpetrator-to-be either apprehended or otherwise stopped in his or her (generally his) tracks. Never do we hear of an intervention that allows such troubled individuals to receive the counseling and treatment they need, to protect themselves, and us, from the demons that haunt them.

And yet, while we will dismiss the perpetrators of such vicious acts as criminals or mentally disturbed outliers, our response to these tragedies reveals far more about our sick society than the troubled souls who committed the crimes. Tens of thousands of people die from gunfire in America every year, and most never get media attention. And yet, in a nation that has normalized the notion of a gun for every person, this is apparently a situation we are willing to tolerate. Based on the lack of an adequate public policy response to America's gun problem, one must conclude that these firearm deaths are viewed as collateral damage, the price society is willing to pay for a so-called "free" society of gun ownership rights.

No one can believe that the level of violence, of gun violence, in the United States is compatible with a stable, vibrant and free society. Add to the mix, the high level of hopelessly unemployed and (or) foreclosed citizens who lack an outlet to vent their frustrations; the legions of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who have returned home with undiagnosed or untreated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; and the use of prisons as a repository for the mentally ill, with inmates returning to the streets sicker than when they were on lockdown. Lots of guns, economic despair, deprivation and mental illness -- these conditions are a recipe for disaster.

In short, we are sick, and we need good medicine. The nation's political leadership often has proven too cowardly or too compromised to provide anything more than band-aids, but the band-aids haven't worked. In a country with so many crises, gun violence is yet another problem we have avoided for too long, only to have it shoot us in the face. But we cannot ignore it anymore, and we must make it right.

A Philly Tragedy Reminds Us of America’s Gun Lust

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com

There’s a story out of Philadelphia that’s enough to break your heart.

On April 21, a man shot his girlfriend to death in front of her 11-year old daughter, then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. Aleen Ali, 45, a supervisor at the city’s Department of Human Services (DHS), walked up to the car of Angela Jeffreys, 34, who was about to take her daughter to school, and stood silently as he started firing. Jeffreys, a clerk at the Criminal Justice Center, was a single mother who also had two other children - one in high school and another in college. Ali left a wife, also an administrator at DHS, and an 18-month-old baby. Jeffreys’ daughter was taken to the local police station, still wearing her school uniform. The police found eight shell casings.

So now, after this senseless loss of two lives, four children have lost a parent. And for what? I am sure that at this point, someone reading this commentary will recite the usual gun rights drivel, that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, that although this was a tragedy, nothing could be done. Most of all, I just love the argument that the second amendment gives us a constitutional right to own as many guns as we please, and that we need more guns to protect us from the “criminals”. Well, I disagree. Many people are pretending they are unaware that more of these deadly incidents are occurring these days.

In Pittsburgh, there was the racist man who killed three police officers. He hated Obama, and said he would defend himself if anyone tried to take his guns. In Binghamton, NY, there was the Vietnamese immigrant who killed 13 people at an immigrant services center, and then committed suicide. And in California, an unemployed hospital technician shot his five children and wife to death before taking his own life.

And it all seems to point back to the same thing: this country has too many guns, over 200 million privately-owned weapons to be exact. That includes handguns, rifles, and shotguns, and millions more are added to that amount each year. In my humble opinion, the existence of so many guns seems to be particularly hazardous in a pathologically unstable nation such as the United States. This nation boasts an alarming combination of systemic chronic unemployment and a lack of opportunity, with substantial segments of the population with low levels of education and no marketable skills, and inadequate methods of conflict resolution. Throw in widespread undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, and a rise in activity among right-wing extremist hate groups, and you have a recipe for disaster. Plus, to make things worse, we are exporting our violence to Mexico with a drug war fueled by American weapons.

Not wanting to go off half-cocked without looking at the destruction caused by guns in America each year, I decided to consult the statistics. And I must say, the statistics are sobering:

• According to the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence, the U.S. leads the world in firearm violence. Gun violence costs the U.S. $100 billion each year in medical costs, mental health treatment and rehabilitation, loss of productivity, and legal and judicial costs.

• In 2005, over 100,000 people in America were shot in murders, assaults, suicides, accidents or by police. Nearly 31,000 of them died. To put things in perspective, 33,651 Americans died in the Korean War, and 47,369 in Vietnam. On average, each day 280 people are shot in the U.S. 84 people die from gun violence, and 34 of them are murdered.

• In 2004, guns were used to murder 56 people in Australia, 184 people in Canada, 73 people in England and Wales, 5 people in New Zealand, and 37 people in Sweden. In comparison, firearms were used to murder 11,344 in the United States.

• In 2006, there were only 154 justifiable homicides by private citizens using handguns in the U.S.

• According to the Centers for Disease Control, American children are at a greater risk of death from firearms than in any other industrialized nation. In one year, firearms killed no children in Japan, 19 in Great Britain, 57 in Germany, 109 in France, 153 in Canada, and 5,285 in the United States. On average, 8 children die from guns every day in the U.S.

• The Brady Campaign reports that keeping a firearm in the home triples the risk of suicide and increases the risk of suicide with a firearm by a factor of 17. States with high household gun ownership have higher suicide rates than those with low gun ownership. In 2005, 17,002 Americans killed themselves with a gun, 2,300 of them were youths (between ages 10-25). Fifty percent of youth suicides are with a gun, making it the fourth leading cause of death in that age group. Eighty-five percent of youths under 18 used a family member’s firearm.

• Unfortunately, guns and domestic violence go hand in hand. A 2003 study found that an abused woman was 6 times more likely to be murdered if there was a gun in the home.

• In 2005, 1,791 women were murdered through the use of a gun. 1,181 women were killed by their intimate partners - over 30% of all murders of women - and 57% of those women were killed by firearms. And from 1990 to 2005, more than two-thirds of murdered spouses and ex-spouses were killed by guns.

• Young African-American women are murdered by firearms at a rate five times higher than White women. The rate for young Latinas is almost 80% higher than Whites.

• African Americans are affected disproportionately by gun violence. Although they are 12% percent of the population, they account for 26% of firearm-related deaths. The Brady Campaign notes that 7,865 Black people die every year due to gun violence. Further, although suicide accounts for a majority (55%) of gun-related deaths in the U.S., in the Black community, homicide accounts for an overwhelming majority (84%) of all gun-related deaths.

• Homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American males between ages 15-34. Between ages 15-24, 90% of the murders are committed with guns. Between ages 24-34, 87% are committed with guns.

• Murder is the second leading cause of death for Blacks ages 10-14, and the third leading cause of death for the 5-9 age range, with guns accounting for 70% and 34% of these deaths, respectively.

Now, if these are acceptable statistics, then there is nothing left to say. And we will chalk it up as a small price to pay for preserving our freedom to shoot each other up when we want to do so.

But if reason prevails, it is clear that such levels of violence are incompatible with a stable, viable society. Why is it easier, in the so-called land of plenty, for a poor person to find a gun - or a prison cell, for that matter - than it is to find a job, a quality education, or even a nutritious meal? Why do some state legislatures legalize the carrying of concealed weapons, in some cases to the workplace and on college campuses? How did an obscure and anachronistic amendment dealing with standing militias suddenly morph into a private right to on-demand firearm possession? Exactly what is going on here?

An old colleague of mine who has since passed said it best. He defined a law as that which is bought and paid for. And what we’re seeing now with the gun control war is a perfect example of that.

There is a reason why the Senate defeated the bankruptcy reform bill, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to renegotiate mortgages and help people stay in their homes. The loan sharks - the mortgage banks that received all that bailout money - used millions of that bailout money to pay the senators to kill it. As Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said recently, “And the banks - hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” No principled stands, no acting for the good of the county, just money.

If the Employee Free Choice Act (EPCA) does not pass, it is because Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Bank of America and others will buy off the Congress. Similarly, if universal healthcare fails in the Congress, then someone will have paid for that, too.

There is a reason why you have three-strikes laws and other draconian sentencing policies that have caused prisons to burst at the seams with overcrowding in California and other states. Private prison corporations and correctional officers’ unions paid for those laws and got their money’s worth. And there is a reason why nearly two-thirds of the prisoners in America are people of color, and yet the legal profession is over 90% White. Someone has paid for the laws and policies that set all of this in motion.

And as for the gun lobby, the weapons manufacturers, they have poured millions into the Congress. Politico reported that between 1997 and 2006, the National Rifle Organization (NRA) spent almost $16 million on outside lobbyists that worked alongside its five in-house lobbyists. And between 1990 and 2006, the NRA spent $16 million in campaign contributions - 83% to Republicans - not to mention the millions of dollars it spent in advertising. Their ultimate goal is a nation without gun laws. We shall see if they get their way.

No good can come from the barrel of the gun, and this nation’s long tradition of gun worship has been a story of violence, fear and intimidation, genocide, lynching, shortened lives, unrealized dreams and devastated communities. We cannot begin to count the number of orphans and widows this nation has created in the process. But society can decide if it wants this gun madness to end.

Black Men are Dying in Philly

By David A. Love
Published in BlackCommentator.com
September 6, 2007

Black men in Philadelphia are an endangered species, murdered at an alarming rate by gun violence.

The city's murder rate is the highest of America's ten largest urban centers. Although Philadelphia has only one-sixth the population of New York City, it has more murders. In 2006, 406 people were murdered in Philadelphia, a trend that shows no sign of relenting through 2007. So far, as of September 4, there have been 279 murders this year.

In fact, the situation is so alarming that Philadelphia City Council members Darrel Clarke and Donna Reed Miller have sued the Pennsylvania legislature, accusing it of placing a stranglehold on the city's ability to enact tougher gun laws.

Unlike New York City, Philadelphia cannot pass its own gun laws. The City Council would like to pass legislation limiting gun purchases to one a month, and strikes at purchasers who buy multiple guns for those who cannot do so because of a criminal record. But the Pennsylvania legislature will not give any municipality that authority. With no waiting period to purchase a gun other than a background check, and police unable to restrict who can carry a concealed weapon, Pennsylvania has one of the country's most lax gun laws. In fact, the Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence gave the state a D+ on laws shielding families from gun violence.

Many would suggest that the Philadelphia murder crisis is being ignored for the same reason that the U.S. and the West ignored the cries for help in Rwanda, and continue to do so today, amidst the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The people who are dying are black.

"I stand here today as an outraged black man," said Michael Nutter, who is poised to become the city's next mayor. "And I'm outraged that more people of more races are not outraged." Nutter noted that of the 406 people murdered in Philadelphia last year, 296 were black adult men.

Miami Police Chief John Timoney seems to agree. "There's also some inherent racism. I can guarantee you ... that if 85 percent of the people in big cities getting killed were white, there'd be a different approach to this whole thing. ... They'd be screaming for more federal legislation. They'd be demanding it, and to hell with the NRA," he recently told CBS News.

The NRA is one of the nation's most powerful lobbyists, and its grip on Pennsylvania is apparent. It seems to have more clout than the families in North and Southwest Philly who are being strangled by gun violence. "This legislature, for too long, has been in the control of the NRA," Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said, noting that criminal penalties for receiving a stolen television are harsher than for a stolen gun. "This legislature, for too long, has done things favored by lobbyists, not things favored by people."

The NRA and the power it wields have little to do with freedom, liberty, or constitutional rights, and everything to do with profiting on a myth about the Second Amendment. The amendment says "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Somehow, the gun lobby has ignored the first part of the amendment, and uses the second part of the amendment as a justification for a limitless gun supply. Common sense should dictate that the proliferation of such weapons — now numbering about one for every American — is incompatible with a stable democracy.

In 1991, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called the Second Amendment "the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime...[the NRA] ha(s) misled the American people and they, I regret to say, they have had far too much influence on the Congress of the United States than as a citizen I would like to see - and I am a gun man." Burger also noted, "The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon...[S]urely the Second Amendment does not remotely guarantee every person the constitutional right to have a 'Saturday Night Special' or a machine gun without any regulation whatever. There is no support in the Constitution for the argument that federal and state governments are powerless to regulate the purchase of such firearms..."

The only gun control law to be struck down on Second Amendment grounds was that of the District of Columbia, which was overturned this year by a federal appeals court. One can only hope that this misguided decision, which D.C. will appeal in the Supreme Court, is only an aberration.

And the U.S. must come to terms with the historical role of gun violence in American society. Whether it was the massacre of native populations, the maintenance of slavery, the reign of terror during Jim Crow segregation, or the suppression of free speech and labor unions, the gun was there. It has been a bloody history, not one to be romanticized. And even today, the use of state-sponsored gun violence in a senseless war in Iraq has cost thousands of lives, and only worsened America's reputation in the international community.

At the same time, for Philly and other urban centers, guns are not the only problem, although they are part of a vicious cycle. Philadelphia is mired in poverty — about 30 percent — in spite of the conspicuous signs of prosperity downtown. Many poor, uneducated and unemployed men with lots of spare time and little or no hope make a perfect recipe for disaster. And communities of color often refuse to cooperate with law enforcement, and understandably so, because of a long history of police brutality and shooting first and asking questions later.

Great cities such as Philadelphia cannot fight this battle alone, blocked every step of the way by suburban and rural legislators whose constituents love their guns. Gun violence touches every part of society, big city and small town alike. And suburbanites, who believe their responsibility to the cities ended with the onset of white flight, must realize that we will rise or fall based on our cities. For example, if Philadelphia is consumed by gun violence and unable to attract new residents and business, the entire region will suffer.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature recently passed a bill that would compel police departments to trace illegal guns confiscated from minors and report them to a state police registry, and expand the definition of firearms to include rifles and shotguns. Gun control advocates say the legislation, which was backed by the NRA, is not enough.

Ultimately, Philadelphia must be freed from the grip of the state legislature and the gun lobby so that it is can develop solutions to stop this bloodletting. The lives of these black men and their families must take priority over the profiteering of arms manufacturers and high-priced lobbyists in Harrisburg.

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love