gun violence

In their first meeting of 2023, Boston City Council members offered up what amounts to at least a partial agenda for the new year.

Gun violence is as American as apple pie. Urban citizens are apprehensive about safety in large cities. As expected, racist Republicans are quick to insist that the shootings are a consequence of large Black populations in major cities. By generating white fear, they hope to diminish the impact of the Black vote, which is usually predominantly Democratic.

In the wake of mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, hundreds gathered at Christopher Columbus Park in Boston’s North End to demand new gun safety policies Saturday.

A bi-partisan group of 20 U.S. Senators Sunday announced an outline for gun safety reform, signaling a step forward in the effort to address recent back-to-back mass shootings while also balancing second amendment rights.

Racist propaganda asserts that Blacks are responsible for the violence in America, but the evidence refutes that. Indeed, some whites are undoubtedly fearful of violent retribution from Blacks because of slavery, segregation and racial discrimination. However, there has been no united vengeance attack by Blacks against whites.

Robert Aaron Long, the alleged mass shooter in Atlanta, is taken into custody without incident. His non-violent capture is not a fluke, aberration, or an anomaly. We have seen this time and again, a white mass killer guns down multitudes in shopping centers, schools, and in public places, and in almost all cases, they meekly surrender and are arrested.

What I’ve come to learn as a physician is that the ER is where the failures of public policy present themselves in their most crude, violent, and visceral form. Yes, we must have strong gun control laws on the books, but we must also address the conditions that allow violence to foster and create a situation where a young woman can be shot in the head during daylight hours.

Students gathered on City Hall Plaza modeled protective clothing, camouflage and police siren horns, to highlight the potential threat of another mass shooting and the dangers they face returning to school in the coming days.