The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Gun Laws Don't Matter, Race Does
“Structural racism” is to blame for mass shootings, CNN announced last month. The impetus was a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), but CNN might have buried the lead: “There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings.”
Journalist Daniel Greenfield picked that up and explained why JAMA and CNN still concluded it’s all about race:
The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like the Las Vegas festival shooting and Sandy Hook in which most of the victims were not black,” Bloomberg added.
Faced with an immovable statistical object and the unstoppable force of equity, the JAMA paper blames the whole thing on structural racism. The study correlates urban areas and neighborhoods with high concentrations of single-parent households" to mass shootings. It then demonstrates that “structural racism” must be at fault because of “the percentage of the population that is black.” Black people in the study are interchangeable with racism.
Such is the state of woke medical science which tries to fix racism with more racism. The study never comes up with any plausible explanation of how structural racism causes people to shoot each other. At one point it claims that “racial residential segregation practices are predictive of various types of shootings” in a country where segregation had been abolished since 1964.
The study’s definition of segregation is so senseless that it lists majority black cities like Detroit, a 77% black city, as being 73% segregated, and Baltimore, a 62% black city, as being 64% segregated. A city with a strong black majority and black leaders is racially segregated and its people are suffering from “structural racism”. That’s why there are so many mass shootings.
But if segregation is the issue then why does Atlanta, which had actual segregation, have only 18 mass shootings, while Chicago has 141? Southern cities show up as less segregated and less violent in the paper’s data. A history of segregation is clearly not the issue. This isn’t about the past, whether it’s the historical revisionism of the 1619 Project, or any other.
Greenfield picks apart some other assertions in this bogus JAMA study before rhetorically asking, “What magical ‘structural racism’ is forcing black Democrats to ‘segregate’ their own cities and how does that cause gangs to shoot each other in the street?” JAMA could only “answer” that question by saying “future research is needed.” He concludes:
The lies of anti-racism lies don’t help black people or anyone else. Gun laws don’t work. Blaming racism doesn’t work. The only thing that works is personal responsibility.
The cult of anti-racism insists, as the study does, that everything can be explained by waving at the “normalized and legitimized range of policies, practices, and attitudes that routinely produce cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color.” Rather than the adverse outcomes being the result of choices from within the community, critical race theory chooses to render black people powerless victims by claiming that their problems all come from outside.
Structural racism, like guns, doesn’t kill people.