the forgotten cities of columbine

On the brink of the ten year reunion of Columbine, is gun violence in the United States any better? All cases point to no – but does anyone care?

Some of the latest school shootings have happened on college campuses. And some of the latest shootings happened in Pittsburgh, PA and Binghamton, NY. Many of these shooting don’t create chaos or panic in the United States. Many are just talked about for a couple days and then left hanging – others are left to tribute. On college campuses and in schools it has created more hysteria and controversy than any other type of gun murder. Every since Columbine, school shootings seem to get all of the attention. Yet, they are not a bulk of the murders. In the documentary Bowling for Columbine, the movie addresses the ease of accessibility of bullets and guns to kids (as well as people who should be denied a gun). And five years later at Virginia Tech people are blaming again the accessibility of guns.

Gun owners, the NRA, and the like refute that guns are the problem. In a world that is built on the idea of freedom, guns will never be restricted. But as advocates look at the destruction and death that befall the United States (and the world) they can’t help but think that accessibility is a problem. And yet, it is only a tip of the iceberg. Is it not?

In Chicago last year there were 510 murders. Chicago “beat” out both the larger cities of Los Angeles and New York City in murders in 2008. It’s a staggering number, no? The number is indicative of something far beyond guns: it is an issue of poverty, health care, racism, injustice. We’re not talking about the grand suburbs like Columbine. No, when we look at the cities at the top of the murder rate they are cities like Camden, Gary, Detroit, Flint, Compton, etcetera, that have been riddled with injustice. Cities left to fend for themselves, just trying to survive each day.

They are the cities that are forgotten. The cities whose murder rates are so high that people avoid even driving through that city, who avoid driving through that part of town. It is in the forgotten that schools and children are left to fend for themselves. It is the forgotten who are left without jobs not just in a bad economy, but in a thriving economy. It is the kind of place where families, businesses, and companies are there one day and paving a yellow brick road in the ‘burbs the next.

This is what we do though. As Rob Herbert writes in his article in the NYT,

“This is the American way. Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention
understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in
non-terror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000
dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan.”

When does it stop? When do we turn back to the places that were left behind because of the social issues at hand around the United States?