PK NOTE: 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing is upon us. Pick up a copy of ‘Whitey on the Moon’: Race, Politics, and the death of the U.S. Space Program, 1958 – 1972 to remember this monumental occasion, and what happened to the space program after Apollo 17 landed back on earth.

And not once in this article or the studies cited within the piece do we learn young black and brown men are disproportionately impacted by gun violence, because young black and brown people shoot each other disproportionately, causing the “urban” violence so overwhelmingly impacting non-whites. [Democrats are skipping out on the most important gun fight of all, Boston Globe, July 19, 2019]:

Urban violence accounts for the overwhelming majority of homicides in the United States, and it disproportionately affects poor people of color. For young Latino men, homicide is the second-leading cause of death . For young African-American men, it is not just the leading cause of death ; homicide accounts for more deaths than the nine other top causes combined.

All that said, the candidates are still failing to focus on what is simultaneously the most serious and most solvable form of such violence: shootings and killings on the streets of our cities.

IN THE DEMOCRATIC primary campaign for president, candidates are going bigger and bolder on guns than ever before. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for a “public health approach” to preventing gun violence. Before withdrawing from the race, Representative Eric Swalwell proposed a mandatory buyback for military-style weapons. Senator Cory Booker has advocated for a national gun licensing program and tried to highlight his policies in Boston recently (before bad weather forced him to cancel).

Not surprisingly, addressing such violence is critically important to people of color, a key Democratic constituency. In one survey of 1,200 African Americans and Latinos, 80 percent of African Americans and 54 percent of Latinos agreed that gun violence was an “extremely serious problem,” even more so than police misconduct or mass incarceration. Finally, while urban violence disproportionately affects poor racial minorities, the general public also pays for violence via higher taxes, increased insurance premiums, diminished economic activity, and lower property values. Crediblestudies estimate the total cost of a single homicide to range between $10 million and $19 million in 2017 dollars. Multiply those figures by the thousands of homicides that year and the cost to the average American was between $531 and $1,020. Some places have it worse than others, of course. But none are immune. Massachusetts may have the lowest gun death rate in the nation, but Boston still saw a rash of 17 shootings in five days over the Fourth of July weekend. Unlike other forms of gun violence, there is plenty of research and data on urban crime. Today we know enough to provide a strong sense of how to tackle this terrible problem.

Somehow, black and brown people shooting one another on a daily basis in America’s largest cities is the fault of white people and their creating of communities where predominantly white people reside. Thus, white people must lose their 2nd Amendment rights, because black and brown people in urban America can’t stop shooting one another.

Black people shooting black people in communities and neighborhoods of Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Dallas, Houston, Miami, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and New York City where few white people dare traverse is obviously the fault of white people and the nefarious structural racism they engineer.

This, this is truly what the ruling elite believe and postulate as the reason why almost all of the gun violence in urban America affects black people (never once daring to publish the arrest rates for black and brown people in fatal and nonfatal shootings ).

A genetic predisposition to violence among black people is the obvious reason, but such an admission for the high rates of gun violence among black people would dismantle the carefully constructed pillars of egalitarianism precariously holding together Black-Run America (BRA).

Brick by brick, they are coming down.