The National Rifle Association's annual convention starts here on Friday. A banner outside my hotel boasts "Over Nine Acres of Guns". Funnily enough, there are already a lot of guns in Indianapolis, with many enthusiastic devotees. They just won't be at this convention. They'll be further north, and to the east, and, most likely, they will be black. They will be young. Their guns will, in one way or another, be illegal. They will use their guns more.



In fact, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department is predicting a 25% increase in gun traffic just this year. This comes on top of an already record-setting uptick in violent crime that last year led to the city's highest murder rate in seven years – 10% per capita more than Chicago – and is likely to exceed that rate this year. According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of this writing, there were five shootings here in the last 72 hours. Scanning the papers, I found three more last night, all within 10 miles of downtown. Wait, I checked again: not three shootings last night, but four.



You might think there's a wide cultural and logistical gulf between the gun enthusiasts downtown and the ones in the neighborhoods where they don't need banners to announce the presence of firearms. But the two groups have more in common than you'd think – including at least one supplier. Don's Guns, just seven miles away from the convention center, is one of the country's top five suppliers of guns used in the commission of a crime. Don Davis, the Don in Don's Guns, is a believer in word-of-mouth advertising, obviously; this week, he told one reporter that he welcomes the NRA convention because "enthusiasts will see something they like at the NRA's gun and ammo exhibits and then go shopping."

Don's Guns supplies criminals with weapons and, less directly, supplies those against gun regulation with a favorite counterexample to the notion that gun control works: But what about Chicago?

Most of the guns confiscated by Chicago police come from just outside the city limits; the second-biggest supplier is Indiana. A lot of guns up in northeast Indianapolis, just like those owned by the NRA members across the street from me today, were legal when they were first bought. And after that? A survey of incarcerated juveniles found that they obtained their guns through "informal purchases, trades with family members and friends or acquaintances"; another study found that friends and family were the source of 30 to 40% of guns used in crimes. "Friends and family" – and "street trade" – sounds to me a lot like the "private sales" that the NRA feels pretty strongly about protecting, albeit skewed dangerously young.

Then again, Sunday is NRA Youth Day!

The NRA doesn't spend a lot of time talking about solutions to inner-city gun violence; they're too busy using it to scare people into thinking they need guns. To the extent they pose a strategy for ending it, the refrain is simple: "enforce existing laws". This sounds relatively sane – see, we're not advocating a total free-for-all – though it's also incredibly condescending to the hard-working police departments of our major metropolitan areas, who mostly would like more gun laws to enforce.

"Enforce existing laws" is a solution to inner-city gun crime only if you believe that it's not guns that are the problem, but the people that use them. Those who advocate the solution assume, understandably, that illegal guns are just a part of the web of criminality that blankets all urban areas. Take the criminals out of the equation, the logic goes, and you'll get rid of gun violence.

But most inner-city gun violence isn't directly related to ongoing criminal activity. It's violence that stems from arguments over bragging rights or girls or wounded pride: one study of urban youth violence found that 42% of violent altercations stemmed primarily from "being disrespected," 31% from the offender's girlfriend being insulted. In firearm homicides specifically, "other arguments" accounted for almost two and half times (1,801) as many deaths as juvenile gang killings (681) and five times as many as those involving narcotics trade (311).

The young black men who die from gun violence are dying not because they're so different from young people people everywhere, but because they're so much like them. They argue about the things young men everywhere argue about. They just have guns.

The gun violence rampant in inner cities actually a case study of what happens when you make guns a part of people's everyday lives, a position that the NRA and its allies have lately advocated with unself-conscious zeal. "People who follow the rules can protect themselves and their families from people who don't follow the rules," bragged Georgia Gov Nathan Deal of the state's new "guns everywhere" law. He added: "The Second Amendment should never be an afterthought. It should reside at the forefronts of our minds."

Places like Chicago and northeast Indianapolis are the de facto conceal-carry zones Gov Deal describes, where guns and violence and risk are, indeed, at the forefront of everyone's minds. The NRA has profited heavily from promoting the notion that everyday citizens are one jack-booted thug away from a bleak future of limited choices and diminished personal freedom.

For our country's poor, limited choices and diminished personal freedom isn't the future – it's now. For one in four of the nation's black men, being under the thumb of authoritarian rule is even more concrete: they're in overcrowded, often poorly-maintained detention facilities even worse than the ones Glenn Beck warns his listeners about, locked up as part of a war they didn't start and didn't feel they had much choice about entering.

The major difference between a typical inner-city gun owner and the men guarding the Cliven Bundy ranch isn't whether the gun in his hands is legal or not. The biggest difference is that those involved in the Bundy standoff believe that they are victims of systematic persecution. Those guys in northeast Indianapolis really are.