Let’s Celebrate Stand Your Ground.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of February which means it’s also the first day of Black History Month, which is now given official government recognition and for 2023 will be devoted to the celebration of Black Resistance both in contemporary life as well as down through the years.

I hope this year’s theme will serve as a corrective to what has become a one-sided concern within Gun-control Nation about the threat and dangers posed by a legal doctrine known as Stand Your Ground (SYG), which is now a statutory and case law expedient in 44 states. SYG is blamed as a fundamental causal factor in our continued gun-violence carnage, and worse, is used by whites as a legal device to exonerate themselves from being charged with assaults against blacks.

Around these issues floats an even more vexing problem often unsaid, but nevertheless carries an enormous, unstated influence over the way which the contemporary debate about guns and gun violence is shaped. And this problem can be bluntly posited: why do black communities experience so much violent crime?

The usual answer is that the black rate of criminal violence, which is seven times the white rate, is a function of the interplay of ‘root causes’ of poverty and social despair. But if this is the entire explanation, how come the black suicide rate is one-third the suicide rate of whites, and the disparity between black and white suicide rates using guns is even greater than that?