Opinion: New gun control laws are a form of institutional racism. Here’s why.
Schwartz is executive director of San Diego County Gun Owners, a political action committee.
You’ve heard of “institutional racism.” The phrase is heated, controversial and divisive in the usual partisan way.
However, I’m here to tell you that new gun-control laws are a form of institutional racism. That’s right.
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Institutional racism describes the negative, debilitating effects implemented by an institution, such as a government, on a particular racial group.
Consider this question: Which racial groups suffer the most as a result of extreme gun-control laws? When ignorant and arrogant politicians proudly pass new gun-control laws, who is most affected? What does institutional racism have to do with gun laws?
Here’s the answer: When elected officials pass more and increasingly extreme gun laws, all with harsh and lasting penalties, the results show that it’s people of color, especially Black men, who suffer the effects and are disproportionately incarcerated because of it.
Living life as a felon and long-term incarceration have a debilitating negative impact. Gun violations make up a disproportionate number of convictions of those incarcerated.
Taking a look at some facts:
In the 2018 fiscal year, 56.2 percent of those convicted of federal firearms violations were Black and 96.3 percent were men. The average age of convicted persons was 32.
In the 2016 fiscal year, “Black offenders were convicted of a firearms offense carrying a mandatory minimum and subject to that penalty more often than any other racial group (52.6 percent and 53.8 percent, respectively),” according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
In 2017, the California Department of Corrections reported that 28.5 percent of the state’s male prisoners were African-American when only 5.6 percent of California’s adult male population is Black.
More than 20 percent of prisoners in federal prisons have weapons offenses.
In California, the incarceration rate for African Americans is 3,036 out of 100,000, compared to 453 per 100,000 for White people and 757 per 100,000 for Hispanics.
A disproportionately high percentage of people of color are serving time in California and federal jails charged with crimes related to firearms. Prosecutors are using California’s severe gun laws to ensure they can get convictions with long sentences, and now the Biden administration is looking to spread California-style extreme gun laws to all 50 states.
California is well-known to have more laws governing gun ownership and use than any other state in the country. Each law carries severe penalties and creates more opportunities than anywhere else in the country to unintentionally break gun laws. Criminalizing gun ownership will not decrease crime statistics but will increase the number of people charged with gun crimes. What was a simple traffic stop yesterday will turn into a 10-year felony gun conviction tomorrow.
The fact is: The more laws we have that turn people into felons for possessing normal firearms, the more institutional racism will grow.
Terms like “keeping guns off the street” and “keeping guns out of the wrong hands” are merely dog whistles for policies that target and destroy the lives of people of color, especially young, Black men. As a result, families and communities are being irreparably destroyed.
The Biden administration, the Nancy Pelosi-led House, and the Chuck Schumer-led Senate are looking to spread California’s institutional racism across the country.
However, we have already seen in California that bans on firearms and bans on normal capacity magazines do little more than create more ways to increase those in our overcrowded jails and destroy Black and Brown communities.
In 2017, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine titled “Firearm Laws and Firearm Homicides: A Systematic Review” showed that “assault weapon” bans had no significant effect on firearm homicides.
And while it is important to keep firearms out of the hands of convicted felons, we have seen that adding universal background checks to existing federal background checks does not decrease crime. A 2019 study published in Annals of Epidemiology concluded that the implementation of universal background checks in California made no difference in firearm suicide or homicide rates.
The gun laws the Biden administration is championing do not decrease violent crime. Instead, Biden will destroy more lives by putting more people of color in jail and for longer sentences.
Bans on semi-automatic rifles (so-called “assault weapon bans”) have not decreased violent crime — mostly because rifles of any kind are used in fewer than 400 homicides nationwide annually. It would be better to convict career criminals who harm others, but please don’t criminalize the normal behavior of law-abiding gun owners.
If passed, extreme gun-control laws will continue to be used disproportionately against people of color and incarcerate them for the better part of their lives. We oppose these proposed gun-control laws because we believe their lives matter.
Read more opinions on gun control:
As we reopen our schools, we must never forget that our responsibility to keep our children safe.
It is a shared responsibility for all of us to help reduce community gun violence in our most vulnerable communities.
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