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| FILE - In this Jan. 23, 2009 file photo, pallbearers carry the casket of 4-year-old Roberto Lopez Jr., outside Our Lady of Angels Church in Los Angeles. The boy was shot in the chest a week earlier as he walked with his 5-year-old sister in a gang-plagued Echo Park neighborhood. In the wake of the Dec. 14, 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the small town of Newtown, Conn., there is now much political discussion about gun control. For urban advocates, this new emphasis on gun control is long overdue. |
For years, voices have cried in the urban wilderness: We need to talk about gun control.
Yet the guns blazed on.
It
took a small-town slaughter for gun control to become a political
priority. Now, decades' worth of big-city arguments against easy access
to guns are finally being heard, because an unstable young man invaded
an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., with a military-style assault
rifle and 30-bullet magazines. Twenty young children and six adults were
slain.
President Barack Obama called the
tragedy a "wake-up call." Vice President Joe Biden met Thursday with
Obama's cabinet and law-enforcement officers from around the country to
launch a task force on reducing gun violence. Lawmakers who have long
resisted gun control are saying something must be done.
Such
action is energizing those who have sought to reduce urban gun
violence. Donations are up in some places; other leaders have been
working overtime due to this unprecedented moment.
The
moment also is causing some to reflect on the sudden change of heart.
Why now? Why weren't we moved to act by the killing of so many other
children, albeit one by one, in urban areas?
Certainly,
Newtown is a special case, 6- and 7-year-olds riddled with bullets
inside the sanctuary of a classroom. Even in a nation rife with
violence, where there have been three other mass slayings since July and
millions enjoy virtual killing via video games, the nature of this
tragedy is shocking.
But still: "There's a lot
of talk now about we have to protect our children. We have to protect
all of our children, not just the ones living in the suburbs," said
Tammerlin Drummond, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune.
In
her column Monday, Drummond wrote about 7-year-old Heaven Sutton of
Chicago, who was standing next to her mother selling candy when she was
killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout. Also in Chicago, which has
been plagued by a recent spike in gun violence: 6-year-old Aaliyah Shell
was caught in a drive-by while standing on her front porch; and
13-year-old Tyquan Tyler was killed when a someone in a car shot into a
group of youths outside a party.
Wrote
Drummond: "It has taken the murders of 20 babies and six adults in an
upper-middle class neighborhood in Connecticut to achieve what thousands
of gun fatalities in urban communities all over this country could
not."
So again: What took so long? The answers
are complicated by many factors: resignation to urban violence, even
among some of those who live there; the assumption that cities are
dangerous and small towns safe; the idea that some urban victims place
themselves in harm's way.
In March, the
Children's Defense Fund issued a report titled "Protect Children, Not
Guns 2012." It analyzed the latest federal data and counted 299 children
under age 10 killed by guns in 2008 and 2009. That figure included 173
preschool-age children.
Black children and
teens accounted for 45 percent of all child and teen gun deaths, even
though they were only 15 percent of the child/teen population.
"Every
child's life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it,"
said CDF president Marian Wright Edelman in the report.
It got almost no press coverage - until nine months later, when Newtown happened.
Tim
Stevens, founder and chairman of the Black Political Empowerment
Project in Pittsburgh, has been focusing on urban gun violence since
2007, when he said Pennsylvania was declared the worst state for
black-on-black violence.
In the days since the
Newtown killings, Stevens has felt sadness, emotional turmoil - and a
bit of vindication at the new movement on gun control.
Stevens
said America still would have been spurred to action if the Newtown
victims had been black. He recalled the way that the Birmingham, Ala.,
church bombing during the civil rights movement, which killed four black
girls, galvanized the nation in 1963.
"But in
all honestly, because (Newtown) was a suburban, very small quiet town
where normally people feel nothing happens, that does make some degree
of difference," Stevens said. "It made a statement to the nation that if
such profound tragedy can happen there, it obviously can happen
anywhere."
Drummond, the columnist, said in an
interview that even many people who live in violent urban areas, which
are predominantly black and Hispanic, have almost come to accept gun
deaths.
At community meetings in her own East
Oakland neighborhood, where a half-dozen people have been fatally shot
in the past six months, Drummond has heard residents pose more questions
about weed removal or gutter cleaning than stopping the violence.
"If
a white cop kills a black man, there's this huge outcry. But when you
have the vast majority of young black men being killed by other young
black men, you don't get that kind of response," said Drummond, who is
black.
"In order to look at that you have to look at yourself," she said. "You have to say there are issues in this community."
Big
cities have long dealt with the perception that gun violence is an
urban problem. John Feinblatt, who works for New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg and is chief policy advisor for the Mayors Against Illegal
Guns organization, said that Newtown has spurred action because of the
age and number of victims, and that they were killed in school.
"There is no doubt that something has changed," Feinblatt said. "America's heart has been broken."
At
the Violence Policy Center, a national organization that combats gun
violence, an unprecedented surge of donations has arrived since the
Newtown killings, as well as many emails from people asking how they
could help, said executive director Josh Sugarmann.
Why hasn't this happened before, during decades of urban violence?
"There's
an element of race to it," said Sugarmann, who has been working against
gun violence since 1983.
"There's a belief among all too many people
about young black males, if you're shot you're in a gang or someplace
you shouldn't be, or a bad kid doing things you shouldn't be doing. But
in Chicago, there are reports of kids walking to school getting gunned
down."
"The fact that these killings can't shape people's view that something needs to be done," he said, "is incredibly disturbing."
