I’m for the strictest gun control—the kind in Great Britain that bans hand guns and automatic and semi-automatic weapons. That kind of gun control would seriously limit armed violence in the United States. But I’m not so sure about the gun control politicking of President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress. They spent weeks, if not months, crusading for legislation that is not going to get through the Republican House and may not, even if the compromise proposed today were miraculously passed by the House and Senate, make a great deal of difference.

I am not against crusading, and if gun violence were the most serious problem facing the country right now, I would be enthusiastic about the Democrats’ efforts to get the strongest bill practically possible. But things are not hunky-dory here. Unemployment is rising—five years after the Great Recession struck—and the budget sequester will, if anything, make things worse. Theoretically, of course, the Democrats could campaign vigorously for gun control and for a fiscal stimulus, but anyone who has been around Washington for longer than four years knows that administrations can’t get into more than one political fight at a time. My point is that if the administration is going to get into a fight, it should have been over the budget and not gun control.

First of all—and I have made this argument before—turning around the country’s economy is more important to the country’s economic and political future. That goes for gun control’s prospects, too. If the Democrats want to pass tough gun control measures—or address even more far-reaching issues like climate change—they need to win back the House, and they can’t do that with a faltering economy. But I’d also suggest that on the substance of the matter, turning around the economy is as important to ending gun violence as passing the kind of compromise gun control legislation that the Senate might pass, which would leave one important kind of “straw purchases” of guns—and a key source for guns used in crimes—out of its purview.

If you look at the statistics for homicide, the usual offender is not some crazy, alienated kid from Newtown or Aurora. According to sociologist Jennifer Schwartz’s survey, the typical offender is male, has not completed high school, lives in a city and has a previous arrest record. Black males age 18 to 24 have the highest homicide rate of any demographic group. “Taken together,” Schwartz concludes, “the most typical criminal homicide offender is a young black male living in an urban environment.” Schwartz also recounts one of the most common homicide situations is “male-on-male violence” associated with “honor contests and street violence.”

What these statistics suggest is that the prevalence of homicide in the United States has at least something to do with the perpetuation of an African American underclass in cities like Detroit and Baltimore, where many children grow up in poverty with little hope of gainful employment and who seek self-affirmation, as well as income, in crime and violence. The existence of this underclass, described by William Julius Wilson, is rooted in American social and economic history. It’s not a product of being black, but of being black in America. Here’s a figure that gets at the problem: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment in February among whites 16-to-19 years old was 22.1 percent, and among similarly aged blacks was 43.1 percent.