A Stray Shot

Proceedings recently began in a suit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) against 85 gun makers and distributors. At first glance, this would seem to be a commendable action: guns currently pose a serious threat to the safety of Americans that is impossible to ignore, and their production and sale must be extensively restricted.

But while the measures the NAACP suit aims to bring about—tighter regulations on the sale and distribution of guns—are admirable, the organization’s rationale for this suit is badly misguided.

The NAACP presents gun violence as a racial issue, adducing the statistic that African-American teenagers were 16 times more likely than white teens to die from guns between 1990 and 1998. But gun violence is an issue that affects all communities, and it is a major mistake to define it to terms of black and white. Guns can kill and be wielded by anyone, and they need to be more strictly regulated to protect everyone, not any specific minority. Gun advocates comparing the suit’s tactics to those of the Ku Klux Klan are clearly off base, but the NAACP has opened itself to such criticism by conflating the issues of gun control and race. By putting forth its suit on these terms, the NAACP has distracted from the real issues surrounding gun control, and that is indeed regrettable.

It is not just gun control that the suit has muddled and obscured; the NAACP’s suit has also, paradoxically, distracted from the very real issue of violence in minority communities. Many of the problems cited by the NAACP relate to the shamefully slow ambulance and police response times in low-income, minority communities; the statistics to which they point should be a spur for increased government funding to these communities, so that these problems can be effectively addressed.

But this lawsuit is not the way. The NAACP has drawn attention to important issues that must be addressed, but it has helped neither of the causes for which it hopes to advocate with this mix-and-match suit.

Dissent

Guns Protect Law-Abiding Citizens

We agree with the Staff’s dismissal of the NAACP lawsuit as nothing more than grandstanding. But we are concerned that gun control hinders the ability of those living in America’s inner cities to protect themselves from crime. Greater policing and better hospital response times in urbancommunities are measures that undoubtedly deserve our support. But the larger solution to gun violence is not to reduce the self-defense capabilities of decent, upstanding people. Rather, it is to enforce aggressively our current gun-safety statutes and to allow law-abiding citizens the right to own a potentially vital means of protection.

—Duncan M. Currie ’04, Travis R. Kavulla ’06 and

Luke Smith ’04