When I was 15 years old, my father, a former law enforcement officer and firearms instructor in California, had our moving company take his hunting rifle to DC as we relocated our family across the country. Unbeknownst to him, penalties for possessing an unregistered gun in DC were a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison at the time. He obviously had no intention of hurting anyone, no nefarious plans; he simply did not realize how strict DC’s gun laws were.
Of course, he was never caught. Living in an upper middle-class neighborhood, it was unlikely anyone would ever come across his unregistered rifle. But it’s easy to imagine scenarios where other people wouldn’t be so lucky. If either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton have their way, more people like my father will be risking prison for harmless mistakes.
Though the euphemisms and coded language they used were different, if there was one thing that Trump and Clinton agreed on at Monday’s debate, it was that we need to be tougher on gun owners—specifically, of course, gun owners with darker complexions.
The context Lester Holt provided to spur the gun conversation matters greatly. Holt did not ask, “What do we do about gun crime?” or “What is your opinion on gun control?” He asked:
“The share of Americans who say race relations are bad in this country is the highest it’s been in decades, much of it amplified by shootings of African-Americans by police, as we’ve seen recently in Charlotte and Tulsa. Race has been a big issue in this campaign, and one of you is going to have to bridge a very wide and bitter gap.
So how do you heal the divide?”
How did Clinton and Trump answer? They suggested more gun control of minority communities. Clinton’s answer was full of coded language: “We’ve got to get guns out of the hands of those who should not have them.” Why would she answer a question about race this way? Who are “those” people she is referring to?
Meanwhile, Trump’s language was much more transparent than Clinton’s, expressing support for the unconstitutional NYPD policy of “stop and frisk,” which has been ruled to be a form of racial profiling.
“In a place like Chicago you do stop and frisk, which worked very well, Mayor Giuliani is here, worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down. But you take the gun away from criminals that shouldn’t be having it.
We have gangs roaming the street. And in many cases, they’re illegally here, illegal immigrants. And they have guns. And they shoot people.”
I currently work in criminal justice reform, and I can’t help but notice the stunning parallels between the way the leading Presidential candidates talk about guns and the way that politicians ramped up the drug war in the 80’s and 90’s. Those that used and sold drugs were a blight on the country that had to be eliminated. People that used drugs couldn’t help but be violent, and we had to “bring them to heel.” Lawmakers passed mandatory minimum sentences for possession of illegal drugs, tying the hands of judges and forcing them to hand out ridiculously harsh penalties.
Nearly two decades later, the consensus is that the war on drugs is an utter failure. Drug use has remained flat while billions were being spent sending non-violent people to prison. Tough penalties fell disproportionately on minority communities, despite white Americans using drugs at similar rates. Prisons are overcrowded with nonviolent offenders and states have just recently begun to repeal laws that should never have been passed in the first place.
The US is on the verge of making the same mistake with guns, and it is understandable. In the wake of mass shootings, it’s natural try to place blame somewhere. As drugs were used to explain the rampant crime of the late 80s, guns are the new scapegoat for mass shootings and terrorist attacks. It’s easy to say, “Let’s just ban the guns.” It seems like a straightforward solution. Maybe it would be if we could wave a magic wand and make the more than 300 million guns in the United States disappear. As far as I know, neither nominee has a magic wand.
There’s little reason to think that the weight of increasing gun regulations will not again fall on the poor and disenfranchised, while having little effect on preventing violent crime itself. Radly Balko put it like this in his his piece in The Washington Post when describing Shaneen Allen, a 27-year-old black single mother who, had it not been for a pardon from the governor, faced a three-year minimum sentence for simply possessing an unregistered weapon in New Jersey:
“When gun control advocates say we need to crack down on gun offenders, or when they propose that we create new gun crimes, they aren’t suggesting we crack down on people who use guns to rob banks or to commit murders. We already go after those people.”
They’re really proposing that we target people considered dangerous for their mere association with guns. But this isn’t Minority Report; we can’t predict the crimes people will commit based on the guns they own. While rural, white Americans will likely remain unaffected by these tough-on-gun laws (41 percent of white households own guns, compared to just 19 percent of black households), largely minority communities in urban centers will be subject to stop and frisk or arduous registration laws and fees that set them up to be criminals. Do these people really deserve prison for the non-violent offense of owning a dangerous object?
If we need more evidence of how unequal the enforcement of these laws are likely to be, take a look at the history of gun control in the United States. The first gun control laws were written to keep former slaves from owning firearms. One of the first instances of modern gun control was instituted by Republican Ronald Reagan to prevent the Black Panthers from possessing guns in California.
The US cannot repeat the same mistakes it did with the war on drugs, and must accept that the world can be a dangerous place. Giving law enforcement a wide latitude to use force to prosecute people for their association with dangerous objects only makes the country less safe and less free, especially for those who already tend to be less safe and less free. Wars are not made on inanimate objects like drugs or guns. They are made on people, and people of color will disproportionately suffer from harsher gun laws.
Timothy-Paul works for Americans for Safe Acccess, a non-profit dedicated to helping patients get access to safe medical marijuana. He grew up in state and national parks all over the country, and moving around frequently taught him to appreciate people with many different points of view. At the College of William and Mary, his studies focused on political philosophy and the US civil rights movement.