Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  Then, as now, black males dominated the ranks of victims (77 percent of black victims) and perpetrators (80 percent of black perpetrators). Wolfgang surmised that economic desperation drove the high rates of violence, calculating that 90 to 95 percent of all offenders in the study (black and white) were “in the lower end of the occupational scale.”

  The availability of guns did not explain Wolfgang’s findings. The instrument most used by black murderers was the blade, which accounted for the highest percentage (47 percent) of the homicides. It is unclear precisely how much this reflected the national trend, and Wolfgang noted studies from other cities where shooting was the leading cause of black homicide.

  Wolfgang lamented the absence of solid, race-specific data prior to 1921 but summarized a variety of studies conducted as data became available. A 1940 assessment of seven sections of the southern United States concluded that the murder and manslaughter rate for blacks was twelve times that of whites. A study of Birmingham, Alabama, from 1937 through 1944 showed that blacks were 85 percent of homicide convictions and 40 percent of the population. In St. Louis from 1949 to 1951, blacks committed 73 percent of homicides and were 18 percent of the population. Wolfgang cautioned that these data are biased by consistently higher conviction rates for blacks than for whites in the southern states surveyed.

  Outside the South, Wolfgang’s survey of victimization studies showed a similar trend. Homicide victimization rates per 100,000 during 1920 and 1925 for Pennsylvania were considerably higher for blacks than for whites both in urban and rural areas. In urban areas, whites had a rate of 5.3 per 100,000, compared to 47.1 for blacks. In rural areas, the white rate was 3.4 and the black rate was 45.2. A similar disparity appeared between 1921 and 1930 in a study of 37 upstate New York counties where the homicide victimization rate for whites was 2.8 per 100,000 and 30.4 for blacks.17

  While we can embrace the modern orthodoxy on the worry about exceptional rates of black victimization and criminality, we cannot say that this is a new variable that automatically explains abandonment of the black tradition of arms. Historically, high intra-racial homicide rates show that the black tradition of arms long required balancing between the legitimate self-defense interests of good people against the costs imposed by a microculture of black criminals abusing guns.

  More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed this microculture the “submerged tenth.”18 In his incomparable exposition of Negro life, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois lamented the rise of “a distinct criminal class” in the urban slums.19 In his sociological study The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois tracked the activity of a black criminal class that in many ways mirrors the modern criminal microculture.20 He reported that life in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward in the late 1890s was “hard, noisy and deadly for too many of the Black people there. On Saturday nights [the neighborhoods] disgorged [the] maimed and murdered. . . . Pushed out of economic opportunities . . . it was not surprising that many Seventh Ward Blacks sought release in drugs and crime or savagely turned on each other out of rage or a sense of hopelessness.”21

  Ida B. Wells, the great patron of the Winchester rifle, wrestled with a similarly dispiriting reality. In 1910, she debated a nominally sympathetic white member of the Negro Fellowship League who highlighted the disproportionate level of black crime in Chicago. Facing the difficult reality, Wells said that she could not refute the empirical claims about disproportionate black criminality, “for that is what the figures seem to indicate.” She shifted instead to explain the phenomena. “The statistics,” she said, “do not mean, as it appears to mean, that the Negro race is the most criminal of the various race groups in Chicago. It does mean that ours is the most neglected group. All the other races in the city are welcomed into the settlements, YMCAs, YWCAs, gymnasiums and every other movement for uplift if only their skins are white. . . . Only one social center welcomes the Negro and that is the saloon. Ought we to wonder at the harvest which we have heard enumerated tonight?”22

  This is a familiar brand of response to discouraging news. And though it might blunt some of the harsher policy prescriptions by unsympathetic critics, making excuses for black criminality does not answer the immediate security concerns of black victims.

  Black victims of intraracial violence were the dominant concern of leaders from the Mississippi Delta Committee for Better Citizenship. They agitated for “greater punishment for Black criminals who committed offenses against Blacks.” The reasoning was summed up by the famously well-armed T. R. M. Howard, who complained that failure to punish black-on-black crime was another manifestation of state malevolence. During a period where racist violence fueled black nightmares, Howard said that the “greatest danger to Negro life in Mississippi is not what white people do to Negroes but what the courts of Mississippi let Negroes of Mississippi do to each other.”23

  Roy Wilkins’s 1925 critique of intraracial violence in Kansas City rings similar. Wilkins complained that “getting Kansas City police to enforce the law in black neighborhoods was almost impossible. For a time we ran a murder-a-week campaign . . . to draw attention to the bloodshed that took place at approximately that rate all through the twenties.” Wilkins viewed the failure to pursue black criminals as overt state malevolence and evidence of an attitude that “there’s one more Negro killed—the more of ’em dead, the less to bother us. Don’t spend too much money running down the killer—he may kill another.”24

  This phenomenon was actually systematized by Mississippi circuit judge Sidney Fant Davis, under the heading of “Negro Law.” The untutored reader, said Davis, might look at the state civil and criminal codes and conclude that they applied equally to blacks and whites, but “nothing could be farther from the truth.” Negro law, said Davis, “determined that certain crimes might be punished or not depending on the racial context.” Intraracial violence (which dominated black victimization), bigamy, and theft purely between blacks were routinely ignored or treated as minor matters.25

  Even black-on-black murder, which as early as 1890 was reportedly the most common form of homicide in Mississippi, passed through a Negro Law filter. Much black-on-black violence was ignored. But where the black victim had some value to or was a favorite of local whites, the prosecution reflected that interest. This was vividly illustrated in the 1911 Sharkey County prosecution of a black man named Judge Collins for the murder of Rube Boyd. The prosecutor argued for the death penalty because “this bad nigger killed a good nigger. The dead nigger was a white man’s nigger, and these bad niggers like to kill that kind.” The black defense attorney for Collins, thoroughly familiar with the nuances of Negro Law, couched his assessment accordingly. “The average white jury,” he explained, “would take it for granted that the killing of a white man’s nigger is a more serious offense than the killing of a plain, everyday black man.”26

  Historic rates and treatment of intraracial violence are illuminating. But it is incomplete and ultimately unconvincing to say that exceptional rates of intra-racial violence are nothing new. Full assessment of competing policies requires examination of relative costs and benefits of firearms and value judgments that drive firearms policy.

  We have already seen how very high rates of gun violence among blacks are disproportionately attributable to young black men. The tough question is, who are these men? General research shows that most murderers are extreme aberrants with long histories of criminal activity, psychopathology, and violence.27 The aberrance of murderers is so solidly demonstrated that researchers consider it a general “criminological axiom.”28 If the general trend holds true, the exceptional rate of black homicide is mainly attributable to a slim microculture of aberrants who fall at the extremes of various measures of risk.

  The modern orthodoxy does not expressly reject the thesis that exceptional black victimization and criminality are attributable to a slim microculture. But blanket gun bans, like those urged as bedrock policy under the modern orthodoxy do carry the implication that the black community at lar
ge cannot be trusted with guns. This is an unavoidable implication of proposals for targeted de jure gun bans in black enclaves, which would be deemed unconstitutional everywhere else. Proponents of this approach probably would prefer that no one have guns. But short of that, some seem willing to settle for targeted gun bans just in places with concentrations of black folk. On the long view, this is quite odd.

  Under the banner of civil rights, this strand of the modern orthodoxy brands the entire community with a badge of inferiority through a race-coded deprivation of an established prerogative of American citizenship. It rings similar to nineteenth-century claims “that colored men were unfit for citizenship” and rationalizations of Black Code gun restrictions targeting freedmen.29 The results of recently overturned gun prohibition laws in Washington, DC, and Chicago confirmed that this prescription only bars legal guns and does little about the flow of illegal guns to the violent microculture. So for a negligible impact on the real targets, these policies stigmatized entire urban enclaves as untrustworthy and left good people unilaterally disarmed against the criminals in their midst.

  The focus on gun control as a response to the exceptional rate of violence among blacks, and especially among young black men, is nonetheless politically appealing because it offers a seemingly straightforward solution to a far deeper problem that really has no easy answer. Consider this summary of the various attempts to explain the exceptional rate of black male violence.

  There exists little consensus among criminologists and other crime scholars regarding “the causes” of black male violence. Numerous explanations have been offered, including biological causes (e.g., head injuries); social disorganization and inadequate socialization; poverty and economic inequality; racial oppression and displaced aggression; adherence to the norms of a subculture of violence; joblessness and family disruption; the cheapening of black life as a result of the imposition of lenient sentences against blacks who assault or murder blacks; and involvement in self-destructive lifestyles centered around heavy drinking, drug abuse and drug trafficking and street gangs. . . . Although they represent a minority viewpoint, some criminologists maintain that racial differences in violent crime offending may stem form genetic/non-acquired biological factors.30

  This scattered assessment leaves the political class with two choices. One is to focus intently on the criminal microclass while at the same time acknowledging that there is no good, ready diagnosis of their behavior and therefore no easy solution. The alternative is to claim there is a ready solution to the problem—stringent supply-side gun control—but that has failed because of malevolent outsiders who block strong gun laws. On this choice, the appeal of the modern orthodoxy is plain.

  The modern orthodoxy has two related advantages that lure the political class. First, it allows one to sidestep difficult conversations about violent self-help. Second, it avoids the stigmatizing class distinctions that come with a hard focus on the microcaste of violent young men.

  To the first point, the focus on strict supply controls blunts militant prescriptions for self-help that public officials will naturally find discomforting. That worry is illustrated by the public declaration of Carl Lawrence, president of the New York NAACP, who in the early 1970s urged harsh medicine against the criminal microclass. Lawrence exhorted the “good people” of every harassed community to arm themselves and “take the streets away from the hoodlums.”31

  This is uncomfortable territory for everyone, but especially for progressives, whose political coin is the promise of public solutions to a wide array of problems. Even those who privately acknowledge that people are on their own within the window of imminence will be reluctant to say it and loath to build security policy around a theme of violent self-help. The modern orthodoxy, with its simplistic prescription for gun control, allows one to avoid the conversation about state failure and self-help.

  The modern orthodoxy also avoids the political risk of stigmatizing the criminal microclass. The nature of this risk becomes apparent when we consider that the young men and boys of this class are also husbands, lovers, fathers, sons, and grandsons of people who may be willing to condemn the criminal down the street, but will go to the mat to defend their own wayward kin. In places with high offender rates, harsh rhetoric and tough policies against the criminal microclass will step on many toes and commit the sin of airing “family” problems in public.32

  Careful politicians might navigate this problem by distinguishing between the full population of offenders, which might be relatively high, and the microculture of violent predators, which always has been quite small. But that is a more complicated strategy than the familiar appeal to community victimization and blame-casting onto distant villains.

  The modern orthodoxy allows policy leaders to avoid openly choosing between Otis McDonald and the thugs who besieged him. It casts them both as victims of the gun or of the “outsiders” who provided it. It promises to make things safer for everyone by attacking that outside threat. At least that is the script.

  But the reality, acknowledged by any serious analysis, is that the success of supply controls depends on taking the gun inventory down toward zero. That is simply impossible in a society that already has nearly as many private firearms as the rest of the world combined. So in practice the modern orthodoxy really does choose between the interests of Otis McDonald and the thugs who besieged him. And perversely, it subordinates McDonald’s self-defense interest and gives the advantage to his tormentors.

  On this balance, the modern orthodoxy seems ill advised. More so because it essentially dismisses promising criminological assessments—like this one from one of the most prolific and sensitive researchers in the field, who advises:

  There is substantial evidence that much could be learned about black homicide and other aspects of black life in the United States if more careful attention were paid to differences among blacks as well as between black and whites. The incidence of homicide among blacks as among non-blacks is significantly correlated with social class. . . . The study of homicide among blacks may benefit from a within-group as well as a between-group analytical framework.33

  But even if blacks are reticent to have this public conversation about the family’s dirty laundry, shouldn’t we at least privilege the interests of innocents and refuse to hand the advantage of arms to their tormentors? Conceding just this much sharpens the remaining analysis in an important way.

  Whether it protects innocents like Shelly Parker and Otis McDonald is a crucial gauge of firearms policy. But what really does it mean to protect this class of innocents? What sort of regulatory scheme leaves the Parker/McDonald class better or worse off? Does giving these people the choice of armed self-defense really offer a plausible chance of good results, or is armed self-defense so dangerous that we can justify taking that choice away?

  We might dismiss the self-defense interest of the Parker/McDonald class by saying that their desire for defensive firearms is simply misguided; that armed self-defense is ineffective, uncommon, or counterproductive. This conclusion might rest on a variety of assumptions that, if sound, could leave us confident that, black tradition of arms notwithstanding, the modern orthodoxy represents the clearly better contemporary policy. Those assumptions require careful attention.

  Although it has long been debunked, one of the early and sometimes still-repeated claims about gun use is that you are 44 times more likely to hurt yourself or someone you love than to use the gun for self-defense. This conjures images of June Cleaver mistakenly shooting Ward when he pops home early from a business trip. The image is false. It is rooted in a study counting gun deaths, most of which were suicides, and ignoring the vast majority of defensive gun uses where no one is shot and the gun is not even fired.34 The point is underscored by the actual data on the June-shoots-Ward incidents. It turns out that “fewer than 2 percent of fatal gun accidents (FGAs) involve a person accidentally shooting someone mistaken for an intruder.”35

  But even if it turns o
ut that people rarely accidently shoot their loved ones, there is still the objection that armed self-defense really doesn’t work. The data say otherwise. Survey data show that Americans defend themselves with guns at a startling rate. There have been fourteen major surveys of defensive gun use (DGU), with results ranging as high as 2 million DGUs per year. The figure is contested. But even skeptics who conducted their own surveys obtained similar results. This has led to a variety of other speculations by incredulous critics. Accounting for the various criticisms, the National Opinion Research Center puts DGUs in the range of 256,500 to 1,210,000, per year.36 These DGUs do not garner headlines because in the vast majority of cases no shots are fired. There is no indication that this phenomenon excludes blacks.37

  What about the risk that you will have your gun taken and used against you? This concern is generally at odds with the DGU data, and textured research shows explicitly that people actually are better off resisting than submitting. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) show that a victim’s weapon is taken in about 1 percent of cases. The NCVS and other sources also conclude that there is no sound empirical evidence that resistance provokes fatal attacks.38 In a study of all of the NCVS data on robberies from 1979 through 1985, the firearm offered the most effective form of resistance. Resistance with a gun was the method most likely to thwart the crime and most likely to prevent injury to the victim.39 The NCVS data show that “the use of a gun by the victim significantly reduces her chance of being injured in situations when a robber is armed with a non-gun weapon.”40