The Violence Is Rooted in the Culture, Not the Gun Store

Someone read a statement from Jackson urging "gun shops and gun manufacturers to stop the epidemic of rising gun violence."

Excuse me, but I just don't see why any black person would expect gun manufacturers and dealers to help us stop killing ourselves. At Realco, guys pull into the parking lot in big SUVs with tinted glass and spinning rims. They look like gangbangers from a rap music video. If some gun-control advocates had their way, Realco would reject those young black men as customers because they fit a racial profile. And Realco would be sued for not selling guns as surely as it was denounced yesterday for selling them.

And go to any major gun show -- into the heart of America's white gun culture -- and you'll find plenty of Confederate flags and supremacist literature on display. And even if everybody at the show doesn't subscribe to those views, the people there aren't offended enough to stay away.

This fight is not so much over guns as culture. Largely rural, conservative whites are protecting a gun-loving lifestyle because they care more about it than they care about the loss of black lives to gun violence in urban areas. And if you want to fight that culture, you have to have a culture to fight with.

"In my honest opinion, I'm not so concerned about the prevalence of guns," said Kenny Barnes, founder of a D.C.-based anti-gun violence campaign called Guns Aside. "Violence isn't the issue; it's a symptom. It's the result of too many dysfunctional households, failing schools, drug and alcohol abuse and a saturation of music that promotes self-destruction."

Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, argues that rebuilding a culture, strengthening communities and families, is much harder when guns are in the mix.

"It used to be the case that adults in the community would not feel restrained if they saw teenagers getting into trouble, doing things that they shouldn't," he told me during a recent interview. "Now that doesn't occur because people are afraid that the youngsters are carrying guns. Guns have taken away what for centuries has been an effective means of social control. You can ask for greater involvement by concerned citizens, mentors, parents and teachers, but that becomes very difficult to do when the person causing the trouble has a gun."

Unless, perhaps, you have one, too.

The rifle that my dad bought in '64 was probably as much for home defense as for target practice. But protection is not why I wanted the gun. Realco made it look like new, and I plan to mount it as a showpiece, a reminder of the days when kids shot tin cans instead of one another.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com