Friday, October 27, 2017

Spoiler Alert: It Isn't The Guns

Yesterday brought a fairly unremarkable news story. It involved a shooting on a college campus where two young men, one a student, were killed. Why didn't it get much attention when campus shootings or even the hint of a gun normally cause panic and news coverage? To be completely honest, it didn't get the normal over the top attention for two reasons.

First the police apparently knew right away that this was not terrorism or some mass shooting. Immediately we were told that the shooter knew the two men that were shot, Earl Andrews and Monquiarious Caldwell.

Second the shooting happened at Grambling State, one of the "historically black colleges and univerisities" (HBCUs). With a student body that is over 90% black, it was pretty certain that Earl Andrews, the Grambling junior that was murdered, was a black man (since confirmed by a photo of Earl). It is a fair guess that the second man shot, not a Grambling student, is also black based on his name (how many White or Asian people named Monquiarious Caldwell do you know?).

Of course immediately people cried foul that there was not enough attention being paid because they were black. This seemed odd since it was all over the news and in the trending column of my Facebook news feed. Then there were the obvious cries about racism. I pulled this screenshot from the public posts on the trending news....


"GeColby" seems to think that changing gun policies is the answer. Ironically it appears he had been deleting comments, his post showed up in the top of the public feeds on the news story and that means anyone can comment on them. Notice his angry statement at the bottom of the picture. So we need to change our gun policies he cries but then says he won't allow any debate on the issue. How then do we change our policies? Perhaps let GeColby Youngblood decide them on behalf of everyone else since he seems to think that two men are dead "for no reason", as if the gun just knocked on the dorm room door and started blazing away on it's own when the door opened.

At the time I took the screenshot there hadn't been a suspect named or a description, and if you follow the news at all you know that if blacks are shot and the suspect isn't White, or really any time the suspect is black, you can be sure that no description of the suspect is given. In other words, no description of a suspect equals "young black male" 95% of the time. Sure enough, the suspect is now in custody and named (Jaylin Wayne) and you will be as stunned as I am by the photo.


Shocking I know. Totally destroys the narrative.

What GeColby and others don't want to admit is that as soon as we heard it was a shooting on an HBCU campus and one of the dead was named Monquiarious, we knew it was an argument between a couple of black guys that ended up in gunfire. It is common knowledge that black men, around 7% of the population, commit around half of all murders and the murder rate per capita among blacks dwarfs that of White and Latinos.


America doesn't have a gun culture problem or a gun ownership problem. The problem is not our "gun policies". The problem America has is a relatively small percentage of the population committing half of  the murders in this country and another minority, Hispanics, committing murder at almost twice the rate of Whites. If we didn't have blacks and Hispanics in this country, we wouldn't really have much to talk about when it comes to gun violence except the seemingly random events like Las Vegas, and that event stinks of a cover-up more than any other mass casualty event since 9/11.

If the black community wants to stop waking up to news stories of guys named Jaylin murdering guys named Monquiarious, they need to stop worrying about gun control and start worrying about minority control. Until blacks and Hispanics get themselves under control, the murder problem will continue unabated no matter how many angry tweets go out or new laws get passed. The blame for the deaths of Monquiarious and Earl fall squarely on their own community that seems incapable of reacting to any altercation with anything other than lethal violence. Whites get into disputes and even violent disputes but unlike blacks we don't immediately turn to guns to "solve" the problem.

Black lives matter? No, first let's establish that black crimes matter.

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