Newtown Happens in the Inner City Everyday
Newtown shocked us.  As Jesse Washington points out, however, our shock is one of the more important, and less talked about, aspects of this story. 

“For years, voices have cried in the urban wilderness: We need to talk about gun control. Yet the guns blazed on.  It took a small-town slaughter for gun control to become a political priority….

…The moment also is causing some to reflect on the sudden change of heart. Why now? Why weren’t we moved to act by the killing of so many other children, in urban areas?

Certainly, Newtown is a special case….  But still: “There’s a lot of talk now about we have to protect our children. We have to protect all of our children, not just the ones living in the suburbs,” said Tammerlin Drummond, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune.

In her column Monday, Drummond wrote about 7-year-old Heaven Sutton of Chicago, who was standing next to her mother selling candy when she was killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout. Also in Chicago, which has been plagued by a recent spike in gun violence: 6-year-old Aaliyah Shell was caught in a drive-by while standing on her front porch; and 13-year-old Tyquan Tyler was killed when a someone in a car shot into a group of youths outside a party.

Wrote Drummond: “It has taken the murders of 20 babies and six adults in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Connecticut to achieve what thousands of gun fatalities in urban communities all over this country could not.”

So again: What took so long? The answers are complicated by many factors….

…In March, the Children’s Defense Fund issued a report titled “Protect Children, Not Guns 2012.” It analyzed the latest federal data and counted 299 children under age 10 killed by guns in 2008 and 2009. That figure included 173 preschool-age children.

Black children and teens accounted for 45 percent of all child and teen gun deaths, even though they were only 15 percent of the child/teen population.

“Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it,” said CDF president Marian Wright Edelman in the report.

It got almost no press coverage…until nine months later, when Newtown happened.

Even our conversation about addressing gun violence in the wake of Newtown reflects this blindness.  In urban areas assault rifles are far less lethal than semi-automatic handguns.  Let’s take care of all of our children as we deliberate on this question.  Consider this editorial written by a conservative judge.