Cultural Deviancy, Not Guns

By Wal­ter E. Williams, pro­fes­sor of economics

at George Mason University

There’s a story told about a Paris chief of police who was called to a depart­ment store to stop a bur­glary in progress. Upon his arrival, he recon­noi­tered the sit­u­a­tion and ordered his men to sur­round the entrances of the build­ing next door. When ques­tioned about his actions, he replied that he didn’t have enough men to cover the depart­ment store’s many entrances but he did have enough for the build­ing next door. Let’s see whether there are sim­i­lar­i­ties between his strat­egy and today’s gun con­trol strategy.

Last year, Chicago had 512 homi­cides; Detroit had 411; Philadel­phia had 331; and Bal­ti­more had 215. Those cities are joined by other dan­ger­ous cities — such as St. Louis, Mem­phis, Tenn., Flint, Mich., and Cam­den, N.J. — and they also lead the nation in shoot­ings, assaults, rapes and rob­beries. Both the pop­u­la­tions of those cities and their crime vic­tims are pre­dom­i­nantly black. Each year, more than 7,000 blacks are mur­dered. Close to 100 per­cent of the time, the mur­derer is another black person.

Accord­ing to the Bureau of Jus­tice Sta­tis­tics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black mur­der vic­tims. Though blacks are 13 per­cent of the nation’s pop­u­la­tion, they account for more than 50 per­cent of homi­cide vic­tims. Nation­ally, the black homi­cide vic­tim­iza­tion rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites. Cou­pled with being most of the nation’s homi­cide vic­tims, blacks are also most of the vic­tims of vio­lent per­sonal crimes, such as assault and rob­bery. The mag­ni­tude of this tragedy can be seen in another light. Accord­ing to a Tuskegee Nor­mal and Indus­trial Insti­tute study, between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites.

What per­cent­age of mur­ders, irre­spec­tive of race, are com­mit­ted with what are being called assault weapons? You’d be hard put to come up with an amount greater than 1 or 2 per­cent. In fact, accord­ing to FBI data from 2011, there were 323 mur­ders com­mit­ted with a rifle of any kind but 496 mur­ders com­mit­ted with a ham­mer or a club. But peo­ple who want to weaken our Sec­ond Amend­ment guar­an­tees employ a strat­egy like that of the Paris chief of police. They can’t do much about ham­mers, clubs, fists or pis­tols, but by exploit­ing pub­lic igno­rance, they might have a bit of suc­cess get­ting an “assault weapon” ban that will have lit­tle impact on vio­lent crime.

There are other mea­sures these peo­ple employ in an attempt to end vio­lence that bor­der on lunacy. Mass­a­chu­setts’ Hyan­nis West Ele­men­tary recently warned a 5-year-old’s par­ents that if their son made another gun from a Legos set, he’d be sus­pended. Elementary-school chil­dren have been sus­pended or oth­er­wise dis­ci­plined for draw­ing a pic­ture of a gun or point­ing a fin­ger and say­ing, “Bang, bang.” I shud­der to think about what would hap­pen to kids in a school­yard if they played, as I played nearly 70 years ago, “cops ‘n’ rob­bers” or “cow­boys ‘n’ Indi­ans.” Maybe today’s polit­i­cally cor­rect edu­ca­tors would cut the kids a bit of slack if they said they were play­ing “cow­boys ‘n’ Native Americans.”

What explains a lot of what we see today, which politi­cians and their lib­eral allies would never con­demn, is grow­ing cul­tural deviancy. Twenty-nine per­cent of white chil­dren, 53 per­cent of His­pan­ics and 73 per­cent of black chil­dren are born to unmar­ried women. The absence of a hus­band and father from the home is a strong con­tribut­ing fac­tor to poverty, school fail­ure, crime, drug abuse, emo­tional dis­tur­bance and a host of other social prob­lems. By the way, the low mar­riage rate among blacks is rel­a­tively new. Cen­sus data show that a slightly higher per­cent­age of black adults had mar­ried than white adults from 1890 to 1940. In 2009, the poverty rate among mar­ried whites was 3.2 per­cent; for blacks, it was 7 per­cent, and for His­pan­ics, it was 13.2 per­cent. The higher poverty rates — 22 per­cent for whites, 35.6 per­cent for blacks and 37.9 per­cent for His­pan­ics — are among unmar­ried families.

Other forms of cul­tural deviancy are found in the kind of music accepted today that advo­cates killing and rape and other vile acts. Pun­ish­ment for crim­i­nal behav­ior is lax. Today’s Amer­i­cans accept behav­ior that our par­ents and grand­par­ents never would have accepted.

Posted by Taylor Kaser on Feb 19 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.