Originally published on X, @MorosKostas
Note: this article covers by far the most sensitive topic that exists in the gun debate in this country, and a certain level of unapologetic frankness is necessary for it to not descend into constant (and tiring) qualifiers. I encourage everyone to read through to the end before making assumptions. If the replies descend into racist bashing of Black Americans, I will not hesitate to lock the comments on this article, something I have never done before.
When President Biden launched what he called the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, he adopted one of the key assertions of the gun control movement: our nation’s gun-related crime problem is an “epidemic” that must be solved by increased gun control. But if “gun violence” is an epidemic, then it is certainly not one felt by the whole population equally.
Of course, there is no doubt people of all races have been murdered with guns. Similarly, the scourge of mass shootings, while still a very statistically unlikely threat, has not discriminated in who it harms when such crimes do happen. There is also no doubt that far too many Americans succumb to suicide, a large proportion of which are completed with firearms.
But when it comes to what most people mean when they say “gun violence” – violent crimes committed by a person (or people) against another person (or people) using firearms – there is simply no way to beat around the bush:
Black Americans are far and away the most affected, and it isn’t even close. Addressing the root causes of why is the riddle we must solve as a country. But to do so, we first have to identify the problem with as much specificity as possible, and reject those who try to shut down this debate.
A general overview of the intersection of homicide and race, according to the CDC.
Looking at the CDC’s 2023 provisional data and sorting homicide victims by race shows a startling picture. While Non-Hispanic White Americans and Asian Americans have overall homicide rates of 2.8 per 100,000 and 1.7 per 100,000 respectively, Black Americans are at 28.6 per 100,000. This is significantly higher than other groups as well, including White Hispanics (7.1 per 100,000), and Native Americans (13.6 per 100,000).
Comparing these rates internationally, it’s as if White and Asian Americans are living in Eastern Europe while Black Americans are living in a long-troubled Narco-state like Honduras.
It’s also important to note here that while the CDC tells us only victim data and not offender data, the overwhelming majority of homicide is intra-racial, that is, committed by someone of the same race as the victim. For instance, in 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 81% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 89% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders. For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to assume that a given homicide victim was killed by someone of their own race and, therefore, to use the race of the victim as a proxy for the race of the likely offender.
Gun-related homicide follows a similar pattern as general homicide, and this applies at the state level, too.
Narrowing the focus down to gun-related homicide specifically, the CDC tells us that Black Americans were killed using guns at a rate of 24.6 per 100,000 in 2023, compared to just 1.8 per 100,000 for White Americans and 1.0 per 100,000 for Asian Americans.
Frankly, any discussion of gun-related violent crime that does not put the plight of the Black community front and center is a fundamentally ignorant or dishonest discussion. The fact of the matter is, for most Americans, there is just not a very high threat of being killed by a gun-wielding criminal. But for Black Americans, it is a very real threat. This is despite the fact that White Americans are by far the most likely to personally own a gun, with their rate of gun ownership being about 50% higher than that of Black Americans.
This isn’t only seen on a national level. Within states, the disparity can be dramatic. For example, Louisiana frequently tops the chart for homicide (and gun-related homicide), leading it to be a regular target of derision for gun control groups. Yet for the majority of the state’s residents, who are white, gun-related homicide is not a major threat. Of the State’s 2,652,879 white residents, 89 were killed in a gun-related homicide in 2023, a rate of 3.4 per 100,000. But for the black residents, population 1,477,731? They suffered 626 gun-related homicides. A shocking rate of 42.4 per 100,000, or roughly twelve times higher than that of white residents of the state.
In essence, the South’s generally much higher homicide rates are not due to the region’s generally permissive gun laws, but rather because Southern states tend to be made up of far more Black Americans, the demographic that suffers (and inflicts) the most homicides per capita. This is why Louisiana and Idaho can have similarly permissive gun laws, but dramatically different homicide rates. Or on the flip side, why Maryland and Massachusetts can have similarly strict gun laws, but again, find themselves on the opposite ends of the spectrum on homicide rates.
Sometimes the comparison is even more direct. Texas is right next to Louisiana and is a pro-gun state, but has a much lower gun-related homicide rate, as the map below demonstrates.
Digging deeper to better identify the challenge.
Believe it or not, the numbers get even more shocking from here. You see, it isn’t as if all Black Americans, men and women of every age, suffer equally high gun-related homicide rates. While Black women are homicide victims at higher rates than women of other races, they are below the rate of black men by a large margin:
So to solve this problem, the focus must be on Black men. But even that is not specific enough. We need to identify the exact age groups where this problem arises most. And when the data is sorted by race, we see perhaps the most shocking statistic of all: Black men (some of them still teen boys) in the 15-24 age group have a gun-related homicide rate of 100 per 100,000 in 2023.
In other words, if you are a 15-24 year old Black male, you had a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed in a gun-related homicide in 2023 alone.
To be sure, all young males tend to be more violent than older men (and women). But there simply is no comparison racially; White Americans in the 15-24 year old age group have a gun-related homicide rate of 3.4 per 100,000, with Asian American males a bit below that. That’s more than an order of magnitude lower than the rate suffered by Black men and boys. And while Hispanic American men also have an elevated rate of gun-related homicide of 18.3 per 100,000, it is still more than five times lower that of their Black counterparts.
In sum, if we are ever going to significantly reduce America’s homicide rate, the solutions have to focus heavily – perhaps almost exclusively – on treating the violent crisis facing young black males. Anyone who dodges this problem, or pretends this is about “general” gun violence, does not comprehend the scope of the disparity.
Or, they are trying to mislead you.
How debate on this issue is toxically shut down.
Given this problem is so critical, why is it so hard for anyone who is not a Black American to talk about it? I speak from experience on this, as I find myself taking a deep breath before I ever contribute to this discussion, and asking myself whether I really want to dive into these perilous waters. So for this section of the article, I will shift away from statistics and provide my personal experience and opinions.
In my view, there are two main types of people who shut down this debate:
The first group are those who are openly racist against Black Americans. You will likely see some examples (but hopefully not too many) in the comments below. This group loves the confirmation of their prejudices that the homicide data provides them, arguing as they do that Black Americans are supposedly inferior and irredeemably more violent by nature. They have turned the statistics into a meme of sorts, such as “13/52” or “13 does 52” (a reference to the fact that Black Americans are roughly 13% of the population but responsible for over half of homicides). They do not care that even with elevated homicide, the overwhelming majority of Black Americans obviously are not violent killers and just want to live in peace like the rest of us.
While one option is just to ignore them, the problem is that the racist contingent has so overtaken this topic that it has “poisoned the well” for serious discussion focused on identifying the particular issues and solutions. When you raise this topic at all you often get called racist regardless of your good intentions, thanks to the damage the racist contingent has done to the discussion. This has happened to me more than once (and may again in the comments or quote-tweets for this article).
The second group are people who call anyone who raises this topic “racist” in order to shut down any discussion of it. Undoubtedly, some of the people who react that way are understandably upset by the racist contingent, and assume everyone who raises similar-sounding talking points is also just being racist. Theirs is an emotional response, but not a malicious one.
But another sub-group is far more nefarious: they shut down the debate by calling you racist because the discussion hurts their political agenda.
It is no secret that when it comes to the most violent cities in America, there is something else they frequently have in common besides large Black American populations: they are almost exclusively run by the Democratic party, and have been for many decades. Baltimore. St. Louis. Philadelphia. Kansas City. New Orleans. Chicago. The list goes on and on, and you will be hard-pressed to find a Republican Mayor among the lot of them in the last several decades.
The sky-high homicide rates suffered by Black Americans are an indictment of the failed leadership of the Democrats, who have had full control of our most problematic cities for generations.
This is a massive point of insecurity for their partisan supporters, so the best way to deal with such a damning debate is to shut it down immediately by calling anyone who started it racist.
Similarly, gun control advocates also want to stifle this discussion because it obliterates their core argument. If the gun-related homicide problem is correlated heavily with race – but not with the degree of gun laws in a state – then gun control is demonstrably a colossal failure in stopping homicide. We’ve seen this play out in reality, as no amount of endless gun control efforts have solved the homicide problem in Baltimore or Chicago, both of which are in top-rated gun control states. (Maryland is ranked by Everytown as the 8th best state for gun control, Illinois the 3rd best.)
More tragically, their misguided efforts mean that the millions of law-abiding Black Americans have a much harder time exercising their Second Amendment rights, even though they are precisely the people most likely to need access to effective self-defense in the dangerous cities they often live in.
Solutions
This article is primarily about openly identifying the problem of the racial disparity in gun-related homicide and explaining the reasons why this discussion is so hard to have in a constructive way. I don’t pretend to know what all of the solutions are, and it would be arrogant to think I did. The Black community will need to be the first to speak up for itself and break the cycle.
But there are some obvious places to start. For one, the Black family must be restored. According to the US Department of Justice, Black kids are far more likely to be raised by single mothers than children of other races. Despite their best efforts, solo parents often just can’t keep up. It is hard to make sure your teenage son is staying away from gangs and drugs when you have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, after all.
Growing up in a two-parent household is correlated with lifetime success in many ways, and one of those ways is far less exposure to the criminal element. Even in unsafe neighborhoods, children are safer when raised by both parents, particularly if those parents are married:
Opportunity is also critical. Teenage boys and young men who feel they do not have a chance to get ahead are understandably more likely to fall into gangs, drugs, and eventually, gun-related crime. But our schools in so many predominantly-Black areas are a national embarrassment. For example, Chicago schools spend ever-increasing amounts, but test scores remain dismal.
Considering that some additional money spent comes from the federal government, a federal investigation is warranted to find out how exactly it is possible for a doubling of spending in the last decade to result in a roughly 70% decline in proficiency. Perhaps it is the fact that a large share of this money does not ever make it to the students. As a recent article argued:
“Here’s one fact Chicagoans should know as the Chicago Teachers Union demands billions more for its massive labor contract: only half of the $10 billion spent at CPS each year makes it to classrooms and instruction. The other $5 billion goes to fund a sprawling bureaucracy of near-empty to half-empty schools, an increasingly bloated administrative staff and ever more debt, driven largely by pensions. All to the union’s benefit.“
I don’t mean to pick on only Chicago, as these patterns repeat in other cities too. Proper education is one major way to reduce future criminality, as studies have long shown.
To make the dramatic policy shifts necessary, political change is likely needed. Clearly, Black Americans being the most-loyal Democrat voters has not resulted in that party solving these issues despite having generations to do so. For anything to change, Black voters must be willing to fire failed leadership, or we are all wasting our time.
This last election showed some indications of that beginning to happen, but there is a long way to go. This does not necessarily mean only Republicans need participate in these efforts, Democrats who are truly willing to buck their party’s leadership in failed cities would be welcome as well.
Conclusion
I hope that in his second term, President Trump treats this problem as the high priority it should be and that state and local leaders do as well. Lives are being cut short at shocking rates, particularly among young Black men, and I refuse to accept that as an unchangeable fact of life. We can do better than platitudes and failed policies of the past. I’ve identified a couple of possible root causes, but many more undoubtedly exist and should be fully explored.
Thank you for reading this far into an article about a difficult topic. Please comment below with any constructive ideas you have and further this discussion in a constructive way.
About Kostas Moros
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit www.crpa.org.
