Students rally in front of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, March 14, 2018. Students walked out of school to protest gun violence in the biggest demonstration yet of the student activism that has emerged in response to last month’s massacre of 17 people at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
There is no ignoring the double standards between the commendable student-led protests against gun violence that flooded the streets of this nation and elsewhere in the world last weekend and the protests against gun violence that is the bane of Black life in America.
The students, inspired to take a stance against lax gun laws that permit criminals such as the Florida high school shooter to obtain an assault rifle and kill 17 people in cold blood, were embraced — rightfully so — by the mainstream media.
Other than the omnipresent mindlessness always injected into the discussion by the National Rifle Association – the no-chance revocation of the Second Amendment and the suggestion that “gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children” – the embrace was almost universal.
Contrast this to the way Black Lives Matter is received time and time again following yet another shooting of an unarmed Black man by law enforcement. The cadre of sycophants typically burst from the rabbit hole, faux social scientist’s cards in hand, spouting unsubstantiated rationalizations aimed at diminishing the victim and pardoning the alleged perpetrators.
The surviving family members of 22-year old Stephon Clarke should be preparing themselves to hear absurdities about Black-on-Black crime in places like Chicago and Baltimore and absentee Black fathers as reasons to justify the actions of police in Sacramento who shot Clarke 20 times in his grandparents backyard while brandishing nothing but a cellphone. For it’s coming.
Almost everyone sees the difference, and it frustrates so many, even law-enforcement officers such as Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross. In order to do the job effectively, Ross has to be focused on fair and equitable policing. How else can one do a job in which your cellphone vibrates approximately once every six hours to notify you that there has been another shooting in the city?
But Ross is also an African-American man who acknowledges his dismay over the way the nation still places a different value on the lives of citizens, all whom are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“It leaves me frustrated, it leaves me dismayed, and it leaves me confused why this country, the greatest country on the earth, doesn’t recognize what you just said,” Ross said on Friday when asked about the differing perceptions of mass shooting compared to the kind that happens in Philadelphia. “This stuff happens every day in neighborhoods and cities around the country.
“Why, with all the vast resources that we have and all of the brainpower that we’ve got, can’t we do something about gun violence in this
