This article is representative of why we cannot have an honest discussion about violence in this country without being labeled as racist.

One of the key tenets of Progs is their capacity to use congnitive dissonance to reconcile their arguments/positions.  They ignore the water in the rain and describe getting wet as a problem.  The truth does not fit this agenda.

( Washington Post )Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.” Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.

But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room.

{snip} According to President Obama’s own studies:  “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) is 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000). The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) is almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).”….. /SD  (link)

Nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years — not just Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson and Columbine — have been committed by white men and boys. Yet when the National Rifle Association (NRA), led by white men, held a news conference after the Newtown massacre to advise Americans on how to reduce gun violence, its leaders’ opinions were widely discussed.

Unlike other groups, white men are not used to being singled out. So we expect that many of them will protest it is unfair if we talk about them. But our nation must correctly define their contribution to our problem of gun violence if it is to be solved.

When white men try to divert attention from gun control by talking about mental health issues, many people buy into the idea that the United States has a national mental health problem, or flawed systems with which to address those problems, and they think that is what produces mass shootings. […]

{snip} New York City is emblematic of the country’s gun violence. According to victims and witnesses, blacks commit 80% of all shootings in New York, though they are 23% of the city’s residents. Add Hispanics and you account for 98% of all shootings. Whites commit a little over 1% of shootings, though they are 35% of the city’s population. These disproportions pertain across the country…… /SD  (link) 

Each of us is programmed from childhood to believe that the top group of our hierarchies — and in the U.S. culture, that’s white men — represents everyone, so it can feel awkward, even ridiculous, when we try to call attention to those people as a distinct group and hold them accountable.

For example, our schools teach American history as the history of everyone in this nation. But the stories we learn are predominantly about white men. To study the history of other groups, people have to take separate classes, such as African American history, women’s history or Native American history. And if we take “Hispanic American History,” we don’t expect to learn “Asian American History,” because a class about anyone but white men is assumed not to be inclusive of anyone else.  (read more)

Here is some information about the authors (HatTip Maggiemoohoo)

Urban Gun Violence – The most common gun violence, by contrast, is drearily predictable and is the source on average of nearly ten thousand homicides a year. Such violence occurs overwhelmingly in certain locations of cities—over the past 30 years in Boston, for example, 75 percent of the city’s shootings occurred in 4.5% of its area, whereas 88.5 percent of the city’s street segments experienced not a single shooting. Urban shootings are retaliatory or the product of the most trivial of slights. They are committed by handguns, not assault rifles. Victims and perpetrators usually know each other, absent bullets going astray. Reforming the involuntary commitment laws and beefing up mental health services are largely irrelevant to these shootings, since though the shooters have serious problems with impulse control and are clearly a danger to themselves and others, few would be deemed mentally ill. And both victims and perpetrators are disproportionately minority, by huge margins.  (link)