Gun Violence as a Result of Police Brutality

What if you received a call saying your mother, father, sister or brother had just been shot and killed at gun point. How would that make you feel? Empty, useless, lost or maybe even confused right? The consequences of gun violence are more pervasive and affect entire communities, families, and children. In order to lower gun violence there has to be more restrictions and harsher consequences for these terrible actions, gun violence deals with a lot of things such as how if affects families & friends, the right to life, police brutality, and also how racially impacted it is.

The Impact of Witnessing Violence

With more than 25% of children witnessing an act of violence in their homes, schools, or community over the past year, and more than 5% witnessing a shooting, it becomes not just an issue of gun regulation, but also of addressing the impact on those who have been traumatized by such violence. Gun violence affects more than just the people, it affects how comfortable people are outside of the homes. The right to be able to live comfortably was taken many years ago when they allowed more citizens to have the right to carry a firearm.

The Illusion of Safety

Nowadays it’s hard to trust anyone just because they’ve been trained or have the right to do something doesn’t mean they’ll use it wisely. Human rights are protected and upheld by international and national laws and treaties. Yet in America, guns kill more than 30,000 men, women and children every single year. Whether you’re walking down the street, in a school or at church no place is truly safe.

The Racial Disparities in Gun Violence

Secondly, a lot of deaths related to gun violence are racially impacted. Sad to say but it’s a fact that most of the people that are dying from firearms are black men. You will rarely hear a white male or a white person in general being killed at gun point. In other words gun violence towards blacks is more normalized than it is towards whites.

The Role of Police in Gun Violence

In addition, something equally important police brutality. Police brutality plays a huge role in both previous points for one police have the right to use the firearm, but are they using it correctly? Also most of police brutality is once again put more towards black than whites. Why is that? More than 1100 people died in the United States in 2015 from injuries inflicted by law enforcement, and police related mortality rates are disproportionately high among men and boys of color. Not only men of color, but men in general have a huge target on their backs when it comes to the police feeling fearful or unsafe to the point where they have to pull a trigger to restrain the person.

The Question of Police Accountability

But do police really have to point a gun to make someone listen to them? The question is how willingly are police to try and communicate with someone before threatening someone else’s life? Because they're fearful of what the other person is capable of. With so many things going on in the world this day in age is anyone really paying attention to the examples that are happening in front of them on a daily basis? What about Atatiana Jefferson, Michael Brown, Botham Jean, Anthony Lamar Smith, Dennis Carolino, Wallace Wilder the list goes on and on, but when is it going to stop? And police actually gasp and understand how much power they hold. Following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, residents took to the streets to demand accountability for those responsible and justice for the victim, and for a community where relations with the police had long been strained.