Exclusion in Gun Control Movement
On March 24, rallies took place in every corner of the nation, as well as few cities abroad. These student-led demonstrations, sparked by the most recent school shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Great Mills High School, attracted hundreds of thousands of protesters.
I attended the Portsmouth March for Our Lives rally where we heard the messages of teenagers and many well-established gun control activists. This included two powerful speeches from Exonians that were met with support. However, when one speaker at the event brought up the fact that people of color– black men and women in particular– are injured and killed by guns at a much higher rate than Caucasian people, her point was met with silence.
That reaction encapsulates one aspect of the gun-control movement which is largely excluded from the narrative: the efforts and achievements of black activists. When black students organized to protest the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Akai Gurley and so many others killed at the hand of police brutality, there was no media outlet calling their rallies “triumphs of organic, youthful grass-roots energy, and of sophisticated organizational muscle,” like The New York Times described the March for Our Lives this past week. No black activists were given the opportunity to appear on the cover of Time Magazine, or even featured in major publications to advance their goal and spread their message of gun control to the public. Instead, black youth were villainized and various news outlets made the looting that took place the focal point of the protests.
On March 18, an unarmed black man was shot by police 20 times while in his grandmother’s backyard. The police officers allegedly mistook the cell phone in Stephon Clark’s hand for a weapon, but they chose to mute their body cameras after fatally wounding him. This was not brought up at the rallies. Stephon Clark is dead, and yet the mass shooters of the 2012 Aurora shooting, the Charleston church shooting and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting are still alive. In other cases, such as the Sandy Hook shooting and the recent case of a bomber in Austin, the perpetrators committed suicide and were not killed by police.
That reaction encapsulates one aspect of the gun-control movement which is largely excluded from the narrative: the efforts and achievements of black activists.
In this country, we have a serious problem with believing and acting upon the stereotypes of people of color. We find it easier to scapegoat them for problems rather than validating their humanity.
This piece is not meant to negate the validity of the current movement that is taking place. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas deserve our respect for their monumental efforts to change a gun-obsessed culture that has been embedded into the social fabric of this nation for so long. We owe it to them, and all survivors of mass shootings, to take solid, concrete action, so that what they experienced will never happen again.
That being said, the two aspects of the gun control movement can coexist within the wider narrative– we can give black leaders credit for their previous work on gun control and empower the March for Our Lives platform at the same time.
One of the Parkland activists, David Hogg, has already called out the media for failing to represent the voices of black students, who make up 25% of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and 40% of the students in his school district. These two issues are tied together. We cannot divorce a need for gun reform from the fact that black people are being shot at disproportionately high rates, and that black voices continue to go unheard. By combining everyone’s voices, we will create an indomitable path for change that no corrupt politician or violence-saturated history can obstruct.