We got another request for money
from the gun people this week.*
This time they sent us a gift, unsolicited and
unearned, little stickers that say: “Society is safer when criminals
don’t know who’s armed.”
Is it? I think criminals already
don’t know who’s armed. But that doesn’t make me feel any safer.
At the place where I work as an
office drone, we have a program that helps families of the victims in the immediate
aftermath of a homicide. 84% of the 79 Oakland homicides we recorded last year
were by gunshot. We also have a program that helps young victims of violence –
and most victims of violence are under 35 -- get their lives back together and deal with their trauma
after an assault.** In 2017, we worked with 134 victims who survived an
assault. 64% were gunshot victims.
Maybe with the claim on their
sticker, the gun people mean to say society is safer if everybody is armed. Like how peaceful and orderly it was in the Old
West.
Pretty much everybody had a gun out here in those days. Pretty much all men and many women carried a gun, sometimes keeping it concealed. According
to historian Clare McKanna, in the Nineteenth Century, in Eastern cities,
murderers rarely used guns for their deeds. But in California, 60% of murderers
used guns. Mostly handguns. As sheriff and gunfighter Bat Masterson said, “Always remember that a 6-shooter is made to kill the other
fellow with and for no other reason on earth.”
I’m certain that the gun people
don’t understand the real nature of the violence that plagues our country, and
especially the violence that has left so many young African American men dead
or wounded over the past 50 years in Oakland. I suspect they don’t really care.
Is it possible that if each of the
80 gunshot victims we worked to support in 2017 had had a gun (surely some of
them did, but they got shot anyway), there’d have been fewer gunshot victims in
our caseload? Or would there have been more?
* I can’t help but feel they are
trying to get me to pay for someone’s eventual violent death. Maybe they think
they are trying to protect us. Even as in their letters they continue to call those
who oppose them names and exaggerate the
nature and degree of the opposition to their mania.
** Most shooting victims in Oakland
end up at Highland Hospital, home of Alameda County’s excellent trauma center.
Staff from our programs meet victims there, at their Highland Hospital
bedsides, to begin the process of helping them deal with life through the cloud
of trauma an assault creates. Our staff help them with the business of getting
back to school or work or home. They also take the temperature of the room. The
people we send in are from the same community as most victims. Many of them
have been shot, or have, for a time, lived the life of the street. And if they
sense a risk of retaliation, or that the victim remains at risk, they work to
bring the temperature down, to discourage retaliation, diffuse tension and
increase safety. Sometimes this required relocation. Sometimes it can be done
through better communications with both sides of a conflict.
