All of these clear headed discussions of race and homicide and the inner city are interesting and potentially useful. However, they're a total dead-end if they become, as someone's sig around here says, "a convenient place to stop thinking."
Reading this discussion through to post 22 a disinterested observer would almost inevitably come to the conclusion, "Oh, there's no need to take legislative action about mass shooters. What we really need to do is take action against black men, especially not letting them have guns."
And that, right there, is NOT a viable destination for our train of thought. First, of course, it would make us sound like the racists our enemies always claim we are. Second, it isn't in any way actionable. The law cannot and should not allow a person to be denied the right to keep and bear arms because of what color their skin happens to be, or where they live. And many of the people such laws would disarm are those who live in far greater danger than any of us here at THR. We WANT them to have guns. We want them to be able to protect themselves, in their home and on their streets. It's a big part of our raison d'etre. And if they do it will feed right into some of the statistics for homicide in urban, black, poor populations.
So there's a practical problem with pointing at these statistics and claiming, "Hey, look, HERE'S where the REAL problem is, over here!"
And the corollary element of that phenomenon is that it really doesn't stop our enemies, or even all the fence-sitters out in armchair land, from trying to ban guns. If we point out that there's a problem with a lot of people getting shot in the inner city, these folks will certainly understand that you can't apply laws inconsistently upon people of different races, classes, or addresses, and so they'll return to the same old tack: Reducing the number of people shot is good, and taking away guns will take away the means of people being shot. We can't take away guns from just these people, but if we take away guns from everybody, homicides by gun will drop.
So? How do we take this analysis of homicide as a race issue and use it as an EFFECTIVE deflection against anti-gun efforts? How do we keep it from simply being a tidy way to end a thread or discussion where we can pat ourselves on the back and say, "see, it isn't US, and it isn't our guns that are the problem!"? How does this become useful?