Dilemmatizing the NRA

So, the Washington Post publishes yet another bullshit article on gun policy.

In this one, the NRA is charged with racism because it doesn’t leap to defend the right of black men to bear arms without incurring a lethal level of police suspicion.

In a previous blog post, I considered some relevant numbers. At 12% of the population blacks commit 50% of violent index crimes. If you restrict to males in the age range that concentrates criminal behavior, the numbers work out to a black suspect being a a more likely homicidal threat to cops and public safety by at least 26:1.

I haven’t worked out how the conditional probabilities crunch out if you have the prior that your suspect is armed, but it probably makes that 26:1 ratio worse rather than better.

Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist. They’re doing what crime statistics and street-level experience train them to do, and they’re right to do it. This was true even before the post-Ferguson wave of deliberate assassinations of police by blacks.

The NRA would, I’m sure, love to defend the RKBA of a black man who isn’t a thug or gangbanger. So would I. The trouble is that when you’re considering police stops nice cases like that are damned thin on the ground.

Seriously, the victims in these stop-and-shoot cases pretty much always turn out to have a history of violent behavior and rap sheets as long as your arm. Often (as in the recent Terence Crutcher case) there is PCP or some other disassociative anaesthetic in their system or in arm’s reach.

It’s hardly any wonder the NRA doesn’t want to spend reputational capital defending the RKBA of these mooks. I wouldn’t either in their shoes; this is not racism, it’s a very rational reluctance to get one’s cause entangled with the scum of the earth.

I cannot help but think that articles like the Post are intended to put the NRA on the horns of a dilemma; remain silent in these cases or be falsely accused of racism, versus speaking up and hearing “Aha! So all that other posturing was bogus, you think it’s just fine for hardened criminals to have guns!”

Sigh…