Showing posts with label gun violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun violence. Show all posts

Saturday, July 23, 2022

A Labyrinth of True Crime

 I've just finished Julian Rubinstein's excellent, The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood. The book won the Colorado Book Award for General Nonfiction. (My Western, Luther, Wyoming, was a finalist in Historical Fiction but didn't get the prize.) The Holly blends history and memoir with the central character being Terrance Roberts who can't seem to run away from his gang past. Roberts' odyssey unfolds as he goes from small time hoodlum to hustler to gang boss to peace activist with time served in jail and prison.  Rubinstein does a great job giving the backstory of Blacks migrating to Denver, the arrival of the Black Panthers, followed by their dissolution, then the emergence of the Crips and Bloods. The book is named after the shopping center where the Bloods used to hang out and has since been razed and the neighborhood gentrified. While I enjoy true crime, what most drew me to the story was that it overlaps my time in Denver. I could follow the action and events though I seldom ventured into gang territory east of Colorado Boulevard. 

Much of the narrative dovetailed into what I know from CDC and US DOJ research into "gun violence," depicting dysfunctional communities prone to violence where minor beefs are settled with beatdowns, knifings, and shootings. For all of today's talk about stopping the iron pipeline of illegal guns, the gangs had no trouble getting heaters, even Kalashnikov rifles during the much-touted Assault Weapons Ban, and later during Colorado's ongoing "common-sense" gun reform. As the story progresses, what comes into focus are two Denvers. The one Denver of disenfranchised Blacks, mostly men, and the other Denver of wealthy white liberals, some sincere and well-intentioned and others who exploit the carnage for political and economic gain. The present rhetoric of "violence interruptors" and using community activism to prevent violent crime and especially homicide and "gun violence" is nothing new. I've studied Oakland Ceasefire, which used this approach and from 2012 through 2018, reduced homicides in that city by 40 percent. Meanwhile in Denver, over the same period, homicides increased by over 70 percent because the local efforts to address gang and gun violence were a sham. Black neighborhoods were promised much, then had the carpet yanked from under them. What happened in Stapleton was a great example as Blacks were priced out of their homes and the community and its problems dispersed to Montbello and Aurora. Rubenstein provides chilling evidence that the DEA, the FBI, and Denver police gave carte blanche to informants to commit crimes, even murder, and thus stoke gang violence, often to secure more funding as part of the criminal justice industrial complex. In many ways, The Holly reminded me of Death Wish, in which the mayhem and bloodshed take a backset to the maneuverings of big city politics. Rubinstein doesn't scrimp on the details and even if you've lived in Denver for decades, you may need a scorecard to keep track of the dead bodies and the back room deals.

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

My thoughts on Tom’s post

By Rick Blechta

I read Tom’s horrible account yesterday of gun violence that took the lives of two of his friends. Then, before I could even write a comment to his post, a gunman once again took the lives of ten people in Boulder, Colorado. I originally planned to continue last week’s post today, but I’m just too numb to write much of anything.

The United States leads the world in mass killings such as the one we saw yesterday as well as the week before. There is no doubt of that. The reason for this is easy to see and I don’t think I even need to mention it because I’m certainly no wiz in figuring these things out.

Can anything be done to stop it? To my despair I have to say no. Firearms are way too prevalent in the US. Basically, if you want a gun, you can get one. If you have mental issues, there’s still little to stop you. Because of American society, the government cannot take them away. The fallout to any politician seriously suggesting this would be too great. The Constitution even tells citizens that they have the right to bear arms — even if the original intent was to provide a “well-regulated militia” to defend the country, rather than a standing army. That idea lasted only to the War of 1812. 

The really terrible end game to this state of affairs is that there is no way to stop mass shootings from happening again. The people of the US just have to live with that. And that’s not to say other countries are immune from the same thing happening.

Life can be so grim sometimes.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

A One-Star Review and Guns

Like other writers, I loathe one-star reviews. I hate to get them, and if there’s a book that I didn’t like I’d rather ignore it and spend my time writing a review of a book that I did enjoy. But I was compelled to write a one-star review on a particular book because it exploits my favorite genre--crime fiction--as a soapbox to promote a political agenda that I disagree with. The book, Unloaded: Crime Writers Writing Without Guns, is an anthology edited by Eric Beetner who uses the book as a platform for his pious grandstanding as a shill for the anti-gun lobby. Read my review here.

No doubt, you’re going to ask, “Mario, what is it about you and guns?”

To begin, I’ve always liked guns. When I was four, my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I told her I wanted a machine gun. Part of the reason I joined the army was that I’d have the opportunity to shoot all kinds of guns. Once I even got to shoot a vintage automatic rifle reportedly used by the police when they ambushed Bonnie and Clyde. Macabre for sure, but if you write crime novels, supremely cool.

Then on September 5, 1985, my father committed suicide with his pistol. It was a day of enormous tragedies, heartache, and shame. I associated guns with those horrific events and my reaction to the pain and grief was to get rid of the few guns that I owned. My attitude was that I didn’t need guns, and neither did anyone else. So for the next twenty-five-plus years I was ambivalent to owning guns.

Then recently I read Woe To Live On by Daniel Woodrell and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.G. Gywnne.

                                 

In both books, the early black powder revolvers were central to the action. I became fascinated with these guns to the point that I decided to buy one. When I mentioned this to a writer friend, he told me that if I owned a gun my chances of being killed by it would be 2.7 times more than if I had no gun. The statistic shocked me. Why would I do such a risky thing? I decided to investigate his claim and that led me to dive headfirst into this debate about guns in America.

I learned that statistic came from a study (long since discredited) headed by Dr. Arthur Kellerman, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control. His study was part of CDC’s quest--not to find the truth or promote public safety--but to cook the evidence in support of abolishing guns. “We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths.” And “…a long term campaign… to convince Americans that guns are, first and foremost, a public health menace.” However skeptical you might be that the CDC willingly compromises its ethics you only need look at their history with the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

The anti-gun lobby, in league with the American medical establishment, likes to preach about the dangers of owning a gun but when you look at the numbers reported by the CDC, for 2015 Accidental Fatalities, you have: Firearms 489; Pedestrian 959; Drowning 3602; Falls 33,381; Automobile 36,161; Poisoning 47,478 (of which half are prescription opioids, i.e., provided by the medical community). Considering that in this country there are as many gun owners as there are car drivers, Americans as gun owners are much safer than Americans as car drivers. And accidental firearms deaths continue to decline (in 2005 it was 789, in 2010 it was 606), and so you think the anti-gun crowd would cheer that trend but they don’t even mention it.

The Epidemic of Gun Violence! Now that sounds super scary. The big numbers that make up “gun violence” are gun homicide and gun suicide, and those numbers are subsets of the much larger totals of violent crime and all suicides. Interesting how no politician or bureaucrat ever says we have an epidemic of violent crime or an epidemic of suicide. By using the term gun violence, the apparatchiks can blame gun owners--people like me--while washing their hands of the hard work needed to stop violent crime (domestic violence, robbery, gang violence, and drug trafficking) and suicide (depression and substance abuse). To me, suicide is especially troubling since we live in a land of promise and plenty, and yet as our material standard-of-living continues to rise, so do our suicides.

If we are truly committed to solving violent crime and suicide, then we must devote the necessary resources and be diligent and honest in grappling with some tough social issues. The solution will not be a policy based on fraudulent agendas, misdirection, and lies.