A popular Black musician in the Chicago area recently had a frightening experience with reactive police officers targeting him for driving around trying to get better phone reception. This type of situation is far too common and the issue of overt racism is should be foremost on our minds.
On Real Time with Bill Maher this last Friday, Wendell Pierce told his unbelievably awful experience with Louisiana police aiming a gun at him for simply being a Black motorist.
In the article, Placing Gun Violence into a Human Rights Framework: Our Moral Imperative we see that gun violence disproportionately impacts African Americans for myriad reasons. America is very lax in protecting our own citizens with our insanely permissive gun laws. The author explains:
The rulings in Geneva this year on the issue of rampant gun violence in the U.S. do not dictate legislation nor interference with our legislative process. They simply point out that our government is failing in its obligation to protect the right to life; and that is fundamentally different from simply stating that gun violence is awful. That right was fundamental to the formation of our country – our unalienable (can not be taken away nor denied) right to life. That right is embedded in our Declaration of Independence, we fought for our independence and established a government to secure that right. The infraction of that right very much becomes ours to address, and even shame those who would deny that right to so many through ignorance, ideology, and special interests that line their pockets.
The NRA and the Republicans (and a few Blue Dogs) are contributing to the inequality of Black Americans by permitting the gun lobby and its profiteers to continue to treat some people as inferior. If slavery were truly abolished, the disproportionate violence and poverty afflicting the Black Community wouldn't exist. Something's got to change, but it's going to take a popular uprising and impossible sums of money to battle the wealthy Right Wing, gun-nut racists.
H/T to @artonissues and Deborah N.
