I recently heard that there are an estimated 250 million guns in the United States. There are an estimated 111 million households in America. Using these numbers that would mean there are 2.2 guns for every household in America. That seems like a lot of guns to me. As I began to ponder these numbers I wondered with all of these guns are we a safer nation? Have all of these guns provided us with the security many of us are seeking?
I began researching the facts concerning gun violence in America in relation to the rest of the industrialized world. What I found was shocking not in what it said about guns but what it said about our culture. With or without guns we live in a violent culture. Confrontation and violence seems to be ingrained in our national psyche. In America, violence appears to be the first remedy to situations both by the government and its people. Do I believe there are too many guns in America? Yes I do, but I don’t believe that the problem for all the violence in America is guns. I believe in trying to reduce the number of guns not because I believe it will make us less violent of a society but because guns make killing and violence too easy. Guns make killing too quick and too efficient. People kill today without thinking and without remorse and with guns you can do that. Imagine if there were fewer guns killing would become more difficult. Guns make killing too detached. Without guns you would have to face down your intended target and it would be messier.
I want to provide some figures to illustrate but the problem with the NRA and other gun lobbyists is that any talk of restricting guns is immediately met with hyperbole and demagoguery. The problem with not considering the arguments and opinions of others is that you begin to seem irrational and foolish. By the way the armed militia argument being necessary to prevent tyranny is wrong on many levels. We aren’t providing arms to minutemen soldiers but to any idiot that can get one. Also an armed society has proven to be no safer a democracy than a non armed society. The US has 90 guns for every 100 people making it the most heavily armed country in the world.[1] The second most armed nation is Yemen, that bastion of democracy. Are the people in England, Canada, or Greece more in danger of losing their democracies because they are not as armed as the US?
On the list of murders per capita in the world the United States ranks 24th. We rank higher than any of the industrialized nations except Russia. We trail countries like Columbia, Mexico, and Zimbabwe; not bad company for the richest nation on earth.
· In 2005 there were 30,694 gun deaths in the US.[2]
· In 1998 gun homicides in the rest of the industrialized world were as follows[3]:
o 373 – Germany
o 151 – Canada
o 57 – Australia
o 19 – Japan
o 54 – England
o 11,789 – US
More guns have obviously not made us safer. However guns alone are not the problem. We must begin to adopt ways to reduce the level of violence in our culture and in our society at large. This will be extremely difficult in a society that glamorizes violence and disseminates it through all forms of media. The economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama have led to an increase in the number of requests for background checks for gun purchases. In November they were up 40% over the previous year and in December they were up by 25%. People are feeling less secure about the future and showing this unease by purchasing more guns.
We have made killing too easy in our country and have not addressed the underlying culture of violence. You cannot glorify violence and then have easy access to guns. Somehow we must tone down the aggression and teach our children that violence is not the answer to all of life’s challenges and difficulties. We must develop a responsible and comprehensive way of reducing the number of guns or none of us will be safe. Just as the drug kingpin Carlos Escobar was held responsible for flooding our streets with dangerous drugs so the gun manufacturers must be held accountable for flooding our streets with guns. We can no longer decide arbitrarily which dangers we seek to address and which ones we don’t. Where there is arbitrary power, there is tyranny.
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. - John Adams
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2834893820070828
[2] CDC Mortality Report 2008
[3] Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
Monday, January 26, 2009
250 Million
Friday, November 9, 2007
Viacom: Corporate Defender of Black Culture
From the believe or not section, I submit the Viacom corporation, a pillar of the corporate culture and business principles. It seems that the Viacom Corporation has decided that it is now the defender of all that is culturally black and will be the decider of what that black culture will consist of. Despite the many pleas from activists and community leaders for Viacom to discontinue to promote negative black cultural images through its subsidiaries MTV and BET, Viacom has come to the conclusion that they know better than blacks what the black cultural experience consists of. By their refusal to comply with the demands of parents and concerned citizens they are in effect saying that those black folks are out of step with their own culture, that these white businessmen are more attuned to the black experience than blacks are. We know what the black people want and we are going to deliver it to them even if it kills them.
In a move reminiscent of the latest Duane “Dog” Chapman interview on CNN, who stated that he felt he was entitled to use the N-word because of his long history with the black community. Of course he failed to mention that as a bounty hunter that history involved throwing a lot of black folks in jail, but what’s a little jail between friends. He thought he was cool enough with the community that he was just like one of the fellas. Hey what’s up my ni**a! The executives at Viacom are obviously going to try using the same tack as the “Dog”, they are presenting black executives as the fronts for their positions believing that these front men and women will have the clout to defuse any complaints from the black community regarding their one-sided view of black life. These networks appeal to the baser natures of black teenagers and young adults with their images of money, drugs, sex and violence.
I am not a censorship type of person; I never have been and never will be. I believe that everyone is responsible for their own decisions and will be judged accordingly. By the same token if you are the only or main network for black programming serving some 85 million households then I believe you have an obligation to that community to provide uplifting images as well as the negative images. I believe that Viacom owes it to the community that they are profiting from to provide balanced coverage. To display only one image of a community and say this is representative of that community is dishonest and fraudulent. The black community has a very diverse populace and is deserving of a platform that displays that diversity. Any network can play to the lowest common denominator. We don’t allow the other networks to do it and we shouldn’t allow these to do it, just because they put a black face on it.
I think these protests go to the heart of a much larger issue that is not receiving any debate. The larger issue is, who determines the cultural symbols of a community? Who is responsible for the images and sounds of a culture? This is a very difficult issue and one that is fraught with controversy, yet it is an issue that must be discussed in our community. The difficulty of course will be the attitude of the current group of young blacks, many young blacks do not feel the necessity or the allegiance with any community organization. Many have the attitude that no one or no group can tell them what to do, this is markedly different from previous generations. In previous generations due to our shared daily public oppression, blacks were more inclined to stick together and form partnerships, more inclined to unite under a single banner. There was a willingness to put aside individual concerns for the greater struggle.
This is not to say that there was not internal strife and there have never been a shortage of dissenting voices, but for the most part during the civil rights movement blacks were willing to be led in their efforts to overcome the overt racism they faced on a daily basis. Today it is not the same, today racism is not so overt. Due to the gains of blacks because of the civil rights movement, black people have more mobility and they have more independence. Also we live in a different society, today our society is more accepting of language and images that were once considered in bad taste or in some cases obscene.
Another issue is that today blacks have unprecedented access to money and material possessions. This is not to say that there are no poor blacks or that there is not still a large discrepancy between blacks and whites in the economic arena, but overall more blacks are economically better off than at any time in our history. With those material and economic gains comes greater access to technology and media. While there will always be those who will use these vehicles for nefarious purposes, we must not blame the access. The real culprits are those behind the access that are using them for reprehensible goals and personal gain.
I think the real answer to who defines a culture and its images is the members of that culture. While others may spotlight certain segments of a culture or subset if you will, the real responsibility lies with those who are being defined. If I don’t like the way someone is defining me it is incumbent upon me to reject that definition. We as black people can no longer shirk the responsibility of defining ourselves to others; we have too much money and too much access. I believe that one of the greatest failures of those blacks who have gained success through entertainment, sports, and business has been the lack of control of the media. For too long we have been content to play the roles created by others, written by others, directed by others, for others.
I am not a big Tyler Perry fan, to me his plots and storylines follow too familiar a pattern, but the thing I have to give him his props for is his willingness to create and define black people with his own media structure and apparatus. Why do we not have more of these types of ventures from other successful black people? Unfortunately, it appears that rather than go out and get our own, once again we are content to work for others or the ones who have developed their own have chosen to ignore their own image and chase after the image of the majority, the infamous crossover.
Blacks command too much economic clout today to allow others to continue to cast us in a negative image, the question is will we stand together against those forces that are willing to sell us out for personal gain. You can’t tell me that if enough black people chose to boycott the advertisers of BET and MTV that they would continue to display those negative images. This thing is about money and whoever controls the purse strings controls the agenda. The reason the networks are playing to this crowd is because they are the ones spending the money. They are the ones buying the crap these shows are promoting and selling. Where that money is coming from is the subject for another essay.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The Heat Is On
Many social reformers have long said that low academic achievement among inner-city children cannot be improved significantly without moving their families to better neighborhoods, but new reports released today that draw on a unique set of data throw cold water on that theory.[1]
There seems to be an all out effort of late to roll back the progress and to discredit the data that supports the efforts to continue that progress. First we have the Supreme Court reversing Brown, then we have the Putnam study[2] of neighborhood diversity, and now improving neighborhoods does not improve academic performance study.[3]
The findings of these studies seem to suggest that for all the “social engineering” and all the integration efforts of white liberals and moderate blacks, there is no hope for the Black community in America. Our children are unable to learn under any circumstances and nobody wants to live next to us. Is there no hope left for the Black community? Are we relegated to third class life in a first class nation; the built in impoverished quotient in capitalism? According to what I am reading and hearing there is a growing sentiment in this country including among some progressives, that we have done all we can do for the Black community. The issues we face are to systemic and intransigent to ever be overcome.
No matter what remedies have been tried the past 40 years the results have been abysmal. Many have said that the breakdown currently going on in the Black community is a direct result of many of the programs designed to foster improvement in those communities. The programs themselves have created more problems than they have solved. These programs have created an “entitlement mentality” that has robbed the black community of its initiative and self-reliance. Instead of looking to itself to solve issues like poor academic performance, crime, and single mother households we are looking for outside forces to create remedies for us.
I have recently been studying some Native American writings and I have come away with some interesting concepts. Many Native American writers believe that the cause of many of their ills today was the imposition of a foreign culture at the detriment of their own culture. They suggest that because the problem was the disturbance of their own culture by western culture, the solution cannot come from that same culture that created the problem. The solutions offered by the offending culture will only create other problems will it attempts to solve the original problems. They also suggest that the only way to overcome these problems is to remove themselves from the dominant culture and return to their own culture. That in doing so they will be able to produce their own cultural solutions to overcome the problems they feel inflicted on them by the integration of the western culture.For them the solutions will not be generated by outsiders, but by the ones familiar with the needs of their people and their cultural differences
I think for too long we in the Black community have allowed others to determine what our goals should be based on their cultural dynamics. That while these goals may be benevolent and worthy, they are destined to fail because they may have a cultural bias. In other words these may not be the goals and aspirations of the majority of Blacks. The Native Americans have come to the realization that those goals offered to them by the majority population do not correspond to their cultural ambitions and that by trying to achieve the goals of others they have lost sight not only of their culture, but of their morality. When you try to achieve the aspirations that others have defined for you, you are destined to fail even when you succeed. How many people have fulfilled the ambitions of a parent or other loved one only to be supremely unhappy with the results? While the goal may provide what is considered success, once achieved there is an emptiness in purpose. There are many unfulfilled successful people, who long for the opportunity to reach their dream, defined by them.
Are the symbols of White success applicable to the Black community? Has seeking after the manifestations of another cultures success actually harmed the success of our own culture? Do we as a culture value education, marriage, and material success or are these the expressions of a foreign culture that we have tried to emulate? That once attained we find them empty and hollow of any deeper meaning and we are left with that emptiness; is this all? Does achieving success in this culture actually alienate us from our own culture, hence the ridicule and animosity towards successful Blacks? To be truly successful in the dominant culture do Black people have to assimilate into that dominant culture and lose the bonds to their own culture in the process? Is there now a disconnect between those Blacks perceived as successful and those Blacks that are perceived as not being successful?
I guess the question I would ask is; do the majority of Blacks believe that the American dream is their dream? Not that they can’t obtain the dream, but do they want to? The Blacks that have achieved success in this culture often look at other Blacks as not “getting it” for their lack of success, but maybe it is the successful Blacks that aren’t getting it?
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/13/AR2007081300966.html?hpid=topnews
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