You love “Glocks and AK-47s more than you love my kids or even your own.”
By Isaac J. Bailey
James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy
Davidson College
Dear white Americans,
I come before you with bowed head, heavy heart, and a long-overdue apology.
I’m sorry for doubting you, for wrongly assuming you were turning a blind eye to gun violence, outside of offering up thoughts and prayers after every high-profile shooting, because it was disproportionately hurting people who wear dark skin like I do.
I was wrong. I know now your indifference had nothing, or very little, to do with race. You just don’t care, or more charitably, you care more about a cartoonish version of the Second Amendment, one that has convinced the majority of the residents of the most-prosperous nation Earth has ever known that tens of thousands of bullet-riddled bodies every year – in the form of murder and homicide and suicide and preventable accidents – is a reasonable price for our freedom.
I’m writing this apology in the wake of yet another mass shooting at yet another school, this time at Michigan State University. But, let’s be honest. The details don’t much matter, neither does the location, something you made clear with your reaction to the slaughter of little white boys and little white girls at Sandy Hook a decade ago and white men and white women six years ago at a concert in Las Vegas. That this keeps happening in the U.S. on a level it doesn’t happen anywhere else in the industrialized world says loudly and profoundly that