I was thinking about The Field Negro’s lament that we never get to hear about the personal stories or suffering relatives of the thousands of black people who die from gunshots each year in our cities, and I decided to try to find some information on some of the people who have died in Philadelphia recently. That led me to the GunCrisis.org webpage where I immediately found a link to Steven D’s most recent piece on gun violence. It’s funny how the world works like that.
GunCrisis.org documents every shooting that occurs in Philadelphia, and some that occur nearby or nationally. They were able to fill their entire front-page with articles about shootings and murders that occurred in Philadelphia in just the last two days.
Police: Officer kills armed man in Frankford
10-year old shot in Philly overnight
Man shot to death in Germantown Saturday night
Gunman shoots five people at Philadelphia house party
79-year-old man shot dead in Pemberton Township Home
Man, 24, shot dead in Kingsessing
Go back one more day and you get this: Five people shot in Philadelphia overnight.
Here’s how The Field Negro put it:
When violence is random and in places that we don’t expect it, we get 24 hour cable coverage and front page news headlines. We know the names of all the victims and the shooter will forever live in infamy. It ignites gun control debates and we ponder and pontificate about the violence of our culture until it fades away and the next tragedy strikes.
That doesn’t happen when we pick up the paper on Monday morning and read about the shootings and mayhem in the streets of pick a city, that’s just the way it is with “those people”. We expect that. It’s like reading the box scores from last night’s baseball game.
We need to think about a lot more than just gun laws. We need to focus on what we report in the news and what we ignore. You know, this applies to missing persons cases, and many other types of crimes, too. It applies to the rip-off artists that run check-cashing joints and other legal scams that we’d never tolerate in our own neighborhoods. We need to focus on the root causes of the gang culture in our cities and how we can make smart effective investments to curtail and reform that culture. We need to look at our drug laws and our prison system.
While we try to figure out how to prevent another Batman Massacre (which killed twelve people) we need to think about what to about gun violence in our cities. We’ve lost 193 people this year in Philadelphia alone. Do you know any of their names?
