MLK's Forgotten Plan to End Gun Violence in Chicago

[BainsBane]

By Simon E. Balto


The article describes a meeting between Martin Luther King, community leaders, and gang members to discuss gun violence in Chicago. The author then offers lessons for the current debate.

In recent weeks, gun control advocates have struggled to even keep the issue of gun violence alive politically. Last month, Vice President Joe Biden tried to rally and assure gun control advocates at the White House. Newark Mayor Cory Booker, meanwhile, tried to generate support for his Senate candidacy by promising to be an advocate in Congress. And gun violence victim, and former Arizona Congresswoman, Gabriel Giffords has continued her campaign for expanded background checks and other gun control measures.

As they do so, the history laid out above is worth recalling. The framework of national debates surrounding gun violence continues to be molded by large-scale suburban shootings like the tragedies in Newtown and Aurora. Yet the numbers and rates of non-suicide gun deaths are remarkably higher in urban areas than in suburban and rural ones, as a host of studies over the last decade and a half have demonstrated. In present-day Chicago, like in late-sixties Chicago or modern New York or Los Angeles, gun homicides are a daily occurrence. Although as the New York Times recently reported, murders in the city so far this year are, mercifully, down significantly, they still average one per day. And the summer, when violence is usually at its worst, has only just begun. At this writing, thirty-six Chicagoans have been murdered in the twenty-two days since the Times story, including a five-year-old and his mother. All but three of them have been killed with a gun.

This portrait of violence, both historical and contemporary, exposes the problems and limitations of our conversations about guns and gun control. Street homicides like those happening in Chicago won’t be fixed by an assault weapons ban or significantly curbed by shifts to the types of limited-capacity magazines that gun control advocates have pushed. Chicago, after all, already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, and has nevertheless been battling the same problem of gun homicides for nearly five decades now. Murders are down since the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, but remain roughly on par with where they were half a century ago. Meanwhile, the city’s means of addressing the problem continues to be reactive, and punitively so. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s current approach -- saturating the most dangerous areas with police -- brings to mind similar strategies that his predecessors in the mayor’s office have tried for decades. They have never been sustainable in the past; there is little reason to believe they’ll suddenly become so now.

Further common-sense regulation of guns is surely a laudable goal, as is better enforcement of existing statutes. But it is far past time to return to what Martin Luther King and gang leaders and liaisons were saying almost fifty years ago: to solve the problem of urban violence, we must address poverty and inequality. Jobs programs, school revitalization, infrastructural investment -- in addition to being good for the long-term health of our social fabric and economy, these are among the most powerful tools at our disposal in the fight against gun violence. Unfortunately, in an austerity age, inner-city investment finds little traction among political leaders. But if we as a nation are serious about our concern with gun deaths, it is no longer possible to keep ignoring these realities.

Read the rest at: http://hnn.us/articles/mlks-forgotten-plan-end-gun-violence-chicago

[SunSeeker]

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