The Patriot Post® · Are Shootings Really Racist?

When in doubt, cry Reecism!

That seems to be the mindset of the gun-grabbing Left, especially as it pertains to “gun violence,” which of course affects inner-city blacks to a greater extent than suburban whites. Or suburban blacks. Or suburban Asians. Or suburban Inuits.

We say “of course” here not out of triumphalism. Not at all. The everyday genocide of black-on-black murder is a blight on our nation and has been for decades. But a new study in JAMA Surgery, a publication of the leftist Journal of the American Medical Association, treats this commonly understood fact as something new, something heretofore unacknowledged. As CNN’s Nicole Chavez reports, “Mass shootings in major metropolitan areas in the United States disproportionately affect Black people, and structural racism may play a role, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Surgery.”

Hmm … is it structural reecism, then, or might this disturbing disproportionality have something to do with the fact that blacks are over-represented in “major metropolitan areas” all across the nation?

Why, yes, it might. Chavez continues: “The study found that in areas with higher Black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher White populations. There are also more Black people injured and killed when mass shootings take place, the findings say.”

The study comes from researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans, who, it’s safe to say, are well aware of the Big Easy’s perennial status as a front-runner — along with cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, Philadelphia, and St. Louis — for the dubious distinction as the nation’s murder capital.

Halfway through the CNN piece, we’d begun to detect a bit of an anti-gun bias, and a subsequent quote from a pair of Northwestern University doctors confirmed this. Referring to the JAMA study, Drs. Kimberly B. Golisch and Leah C. Tatebe said, “The results have implications for targeted interventions to address firearm violence at community and national levels.”

So, you see, it’s a gun problem and not a culture problem. The deep devaluation of human life in urban American culture has nothing to do with the fact that young, inner-city black men and boys have, for decades, been gunning each other down by the bushel.

According to the apologists on the Left, it’s the guns. And it’s the racism. Moreover, it’s an attempt to turn the assailant into the victim and to discount the fundamental criminality. Put another way, when it comes to inner-city black-on-black crime, the researchers and academicians on the Left want to emphasize social justice over criminal justice. They want to absolve the criminals by blaming “structural racism.”

But that approach is in itself racist. To borrow from former President George W. Bush, it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations. We forgive you, young black men, for you knowing not what you do.

Sadly, tragically, we’re about to see a lethal manifestation of this attitude put into practice in the crime-ridden communities of Chicago’s South Side. As Fox News reports: “On Tuesday, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in favor of eliminating the state’s cash bail system. The ruling takes effect Sept. 18, making Illinois the first state to fully abolish cash bail.”

We wrote about no-cash bail recently. Let’s just say we’re not optimistic. Neither is rapper 50 Cent.

The plight of inner-city black Americans has been well documented on these pages by Mark Alexander and our entire team. As Alexander wrote about the politically inconvenient truth regarding race and violence, “When high-profile assaults occur, Democrats default to blaming guns and those who support the Second Amendment as a diversionary distraction to avoid the politically inconvenient truth regarding the actual racial demographic of assailants responsible for the national epidemic of violent crime.” As Alexander concluded, “If Democrats actually believed ‘black lives matter,’ they would not propagate the failed urban policies that proliferate black-on-black violence.”

In other words, it’s all political smoke and mirrors; all an attempt to hide the fact that guns don’t commit homicides — violent thugs do.