By Sarah Mansheim
This month, Chicago, IL, reached the dubious milestone of reaching 400 gun-related deaths for the year. In a city wracked with poverty and a racially-divided population, whose Black neighborhoods face a devastating lack of resources and jobs, gun violence reigns. According to the Chicago Tribune, in September, more than 50 people were shot two weekends in a row.
Gun advocates love to point to Chicago as a reason that gun control doesn’t work – their strict gun control laws don’t curtail the violence, they say. Every 75 minutes, an illegal gun is recovered by Chicago police, according to their own statistics. Many of the illegal guns flow from Mississippi, which reportedly sent 4,000 illegal guns to Chicago over the last decade, and from neighboring Indiana. Those states, which have lax gun laws, have funneled guns into Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods, where the average annual median income is less than $10,000.
The numbers are startling, but, there is no outrage outside of the city and on the front pages of national news sources like The Atlantic and the New York Times: there are no filters on Facebook for users to place over their profile pictures to show their support for the victims of gun violence in Chicago. For most of the country and the world, it’s radio silence.
And, it’s not just Chicago. West Virginia ranks 13th in the nation for gun violence. Based on data published by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in 2009, West Virginia was the second highest number of crime guns to other states per capita. Per capita, West Virginia exports 3.3 times as many crime guns as the national average, and it exports far more crime guns than it imports.
According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Crimes, 280 West Virginians died of firearm-related injuries in 2013. What is it about gun crimes in Chicago, and, at home in West Virginia, that resists outrage?
Compare those numbers to those killed in Paris by ISIS terrorists last weekend. As of the writing of this article, 129 people died during the Friday, Nov. 13, rampage that left the city, and the world, reeling. French President Francoise Hollande called the coordinated attacks on a concert hall, soccer stadium, and four restaurants “an act of war,” and on Sunday, the French began bombing ISIS strongholds in Syria.
In America, citizens are demanding President Barack Obama take a more hawk-like stand on defeating ISIS, and GOP politicos repeatedly demanded that Obama use retribution against ISIS after the Paris attacks. Obama has defied the public’s desire for revenge, telling reporters on Tuesday, that his plan was to continue to support France through the sharing of intelligence and calculated airstrikes as opposed to putting more boots on the ground. To invade Syria, he said, would create another situation like the one America found themselves in Iraq.
After a mass shooting at an Oregon college in September, Obama challenged the media to create a side-by-side graph illustrating the number of Americans killed by gun violence and the number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks. Online news organization Vox did just that. The graph illustrates gun deaths versus terrorist deaths between the years 2001 and 2011. The terrorist graph shows a spike in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks left 2,689 Americans dead, and then rests at zero for the remaining decade. The gun deaths like fluctuates at the top of the graph, never dropping below 11,000 people per year.
Business Insider took Obama’s challenge further. “Worldwide, according to the Global Terrorism Database, 3,521 Americans have died from terror attacks in the United States since 1970. Gun violence, on the other hand, has taken more than twice as many lives in 2015 alone — 8,512 in 2015 so far, according to the Gun Violence Archive,” the article said. The article published in October, and does not reflect the death of American student Nohemi Gonzalez in the Paris attacks.
While Democrats have tried fruitlessly to increase controls on gun and ammunition purchases, the GOP has maintained its strict support the right to bear arms in America. Defense of the Second Amendment, personal freedom, and limited federal government have kept members of the Republican-led Congress in line with the strictly pro-gun party line.
After the Oregon shooting, Florida Governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush said, “Stuff happens, there’s always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.” This reluctance to restrict gun access falls squarely opposite the Republican reactions to the Paris attacks, which is to close the U.S. borders to Syrian refugees and bemoan Obama’s reluctance to immediately invade Syria.
