With zero chance of it being published, the letter to the editor below was submitted to the Washington Post in response to a letter from NPR anchor and racialist Michel Martin published on Saturday, Apr. 10. As a courtesy, it was copied to Ms. Martin and several of her similarly woke NPR colleagues, as well as many Post crime beat and justice reporters, none of whom are eager to acknowledge the politically inconvenient fact that most of our nation’s gun homicides, year after year, are perpetrated by young, largely fatherless black males.
To the Editor:
NPR anchor Michel Martin’s Apr. 10 letter, “On guns and race,” criticized a recent “Five Myths” piece in Outlook for, among other things, “gloss[ing] over the role of race,” specifically “White maleness,” in our nation’s ongoing “gun debate.”
Noting undated Pew research that may not reflect the reported surge in gun sales to women and minorities since last summer’s lawless rioting, the pullback by police who feel undermined by woke politicians and predictably rising violent crime rates in many cities, Ms. Norris claimed that “48 percent of White men own at least one gun” and therefore must be “the dominant gun-buying group.”
Okay. So what? Guns are legal products, and their use for self-defense is enshrinied in the Second Amendment. Our only real problem with guns is their unlawful use by murderous, largely fatherless criminals. Speaking of which, though black males comprise little more than 6 percent of our nation’s population, they consistently perpetrate more than 50 percent of our gun homicides year after year, according to FBI crime data from which folks like Ms. Martin would rather avert their eyes.
But to borrow her letter’s concluding sentence: “I don’t see how you move off the stalemate around gun safety without acknowledging that.”
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.