Gun Violence Is An Intersectional Issue — Let’s Treat It That Way (HuffPo)

[YoungDemCA]

On June 12, when Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American, stepped into a gay club on Latin night armed with an assault rifle and homophobia, and murdered 49 people during Pride month — a month created to celebrate a community that has historically been persecuted by a greater, straighter world — his actions reflected the worst of America: how deadly hate can be if armed with a gun.

But Mateen’s heinous actions are a story that should be familiar to American memory. By now, we have seen continuously how, when armed, hate can assault the most vulnerable populations of America. That night, Mateen was Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old domestic terrorist armed with white supremacy and a handgun, who murdered nine African-Americans at a black church founded by a former slave in Charleston, South Carolina. He was John Russell Houser, a known misogynist and anti-Semite, who shot and killed two people with a handgun at a movie written by a Jewish woman. He was Elliott Rodgers, who killed six people with two knives and several handguns because he believed that his whiteness granted him the right to have sex with “mentally wrong” girls who chose to date, in his words, “ugly black filth.”

These mass shootings are uniquely American because the acts — and perpetrators — are emboldened and built by intersections of hate that are deeply rooted in American history. Should we really be surprised that in a country constructed on the enslavement of black people, the violent persecution and submission of LGBT Americans, and the suppression of women rights, mass shootings — hate crimes — occur premised on these forms of oppression? Through this lens, gun violence and mass shootings are not singular issues, but intersectional, as gun violence directly targets, threatens and harms the livelihoods of women, LGBT Americans, people of color, indigenous people and many others. American gun violence so often manifests in systems of racism, patriarchy, white supremacy and queerphobia that it should be combatted as such.

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It becomes increasingly clear that hate crimes and violent extremism enacted by guns in America are not entirely divorced from America’s history of anti-black racism. Shortly after the mass shooting in Charleston, the Center for American Progress revealed research showing that between 2010 and 2014 roughly 43,000 hate crimes were committed in the United States involving the “use of or threat of a gun.” Sadly, it is not surprising that in 2015, the FBI reported that among all racial groups, African-Americans are most likely to be targeted by a hate crime — roughly two times more likely than any other racial group and 10 times more likely than white people. While gun violence is the second leading cause of death for children in America, in 2010 it was reported that 45 percent of all child gun deaths were “black children and teens” (even though black children make up only 15 percent of all children.)

So, should it surprise us that while African-Americans become disproportionately more likely to be gun homicide victims and targets of hate crime, that they are also, conversely, half as likely as white-Americans to own guns? This statistic summons an often ignored history where the Second Amendment — and guns — have historically enacted as a method for white America to exert dominance over people of color and other oppressed minorities. The right to bear arms has only been afforded to an America that was white, male and straight — and denied to those who would upend this power structure.

When slavery was a tortuous reality for African-Americans, they were denied the right to have weapons without white supervision. And even after slavery was “over,” in the 1900s, gun control measures (such as the 1911 Sullivan and the 1967 Mulford Act) were passed because the ultimate intention — though implicit — was to disarm people of color and Jewish immigrants who realized that they too had the right to bear arms. The fear of black people threatening white supremacy is apparent through the death of Tamir Rice, a 12 year old who was gunned down for playing with a toy gun and the survival of Dylann Roof, who is currently waiting for his trial in state court.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gun-violence-is-an-intersectional-issue-lets-treat_us_576a58a7e4b018c1a15b307f

[Hoyt]

1. Regarding the last box, African-American moms and dads are at the forefront of wanting gun control.

They have seen what it does to communities through crime and through white racists using guns to kill and intimidate.