Summary

Black Lives Matter – Gun Control, 1975. In this chapter, the author discusses how, also in 1975, widely publicized instances of black-on-black crime in Washington D.C. led to a movement towards local gun control legislation that, its proponents hoped, would serve as a model for national laws. The author describes how liberals and conservatives both got behind such legislation (a movement led by black activist and politician John Wilson), and how black people in particular supported it. The author explains this by detailing the growth of black-on-black crime in D.C. in particular, and in America in general, crime that the author links to poverty and other social conditions in the same way as he linked drug use to those same conditions. He also examines the relationship between drugs and violence, pointing out that the debate over the easing of marijuana possession laws was...