What is it About
Latinos and Guns?
by Tom Diaz (March 31, 2013)
National polling regularly shows that enthusiasm among the general population for stricter gun control laws waxes and wanes like the moon. Americans as a whole can't seem to make up their collective mind about guns. They tend to strongly favor tightening access to guns immediately after mass shooting sprees like the slaughter of first grade children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. But the shock gradually fades, and so does support among Americans generally for tougher gun laws.
Latinos, however, are a notable exception. They stand out as consistently supporting stronger laws restricting access to guns. For example, a 2011 poll by Lake Research Partners found that 69 percent of Latinos thought gun laws should be stronger-only 24 percent thought the gun laws were about right as they were. A Pew Research Center poll in April 2012 found that a significantly smaller percentage of Hispanics (29%) than blacks (35%) and whites (57%) thought it was more important to protect gun rights than to restrict gun ownership. And a March 2013 poll by Latino Decisions found strong support among Latino voters for tougher gun control measures, including expanding background checks, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, limiting licenses to carry guns concealed on the person, tightening limits on access to guns by the mentally ill, and creating a national database of gun owners. Latino voters also opposed arming school teachers.
Significantly, this support among Latinos for gun control held firm across partisan lines.
The question this phenomenon raises is, why? Why do Latinos so widely and consistently support gun control? It's hazardous to treat Latinos as a homogenous group in public policy analysis. We are not statistical stereotypes, but human beings with an infinite combination of cultural, political, and personal backgrounds and nuances. A few factors, however, might safely be advanced as explaining in some important way why Latinos in general have not fallen for the American love affair with guns. What ties these factors together is that Latinos in large proportion have seen the destruction that easy access to guns wreaks on the lives and communities of real people.
One of the most certain factors is that most Latinos do not own guns, and significantly less so than other major demographic groups. According to a recent Gallup analysis, a smaller percentage of Hispanics in the United States (18%) own guns than blacks (21%), non-Hispanic whites (33%), and Southern white men (61%).
The gun industry's own marketing research shows that adult interest in guns is directly correlated with early exposure to guns. With the lack of a military draft and the fading of hunting as a sport, the industry is losing crucial youthful contact with guns. This weakening exposure is why the gun industry-largely through the efforts of its trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, ironically located in Newtown, CT-is trying to lower hunting ages, sponsor "kid-friendly" events at shooting ranges, and infiltrate youth groups with "shooting sports" programs. Families that own guns naturally expose their children to guns. This significantly raises the risk of gun death and injury among those children, and indeed among all the family's members. But these children are also quite a bit more likely to buy guns as adults than are children who do not grow up around guns. Latino households are simply not good marketing incubators for the gun industry.
This sparse ownership of guns probably explains a good part of the Latino lack of enthusiasm for so-called "gun rights." As the National Rifle Association (NRA) constantly reminds us, people who own guns and demand the right to own any gun they desire are the center of its political power. But support for the NRA's stubborn rejection of all gun control falls off quickly as one moves away from that intransigent hard-core demographic, even among NRA members. People who do not own guns find the idea of unrestrained access to guns to be illogical and dangerous. This is especially so considering that military-style firepower, like assault rifles and high-capacity semiautomatic pistols, defines the civilian gun market today.
Other probable-but less data-driven-explanations come to mind. Latinos whose roots are in Mexico and Central America are perhaps more likely than others to be aware of the terribly corrosive effects on every aspect of civil society and governance in Latin America caused by the ongoing smuggling of massive numbers of military-style guns from the US civilian market. Many such Latinos have seen, or have relatives who have seen, first hand the damage that the US gun industry is doing in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of military-style guns that are sold legally in the United States and are then smuggled south (and, to the anger of Canadians, increasingly smuggled north) directly empower criminal organizations to confront governments, wage war on each with impunity, and harrow social and political cultures. The United States gun industry supplies the arms that the children hired as assassins by drug trafficking organizations use to kill each other.
This traffic in US guns south also has direct consequences in far too many Latino communities within the United States. The guns sent to Mexico directly empower the transnational criminal organizations that control the illegal trade in drugs, sex slaves, and exploitative immigration to and within the United States. The retail outlets and domestic foot soldiers of these vast, lucrative transnational criminal enterprises are US domestic criminal gangs-including motorcycle gangs, ethnically-oriented street gangs, and prison gangs. The wide-open US civilian gun market is the armorer for these criminal gangs. Our lax national laws make it easy for criminals to traffic in guns from states with weak gun laws to those with tough laws. Latinos who live in or grew up in neighborhoods plagued by drugs and gangs need no instruction about the supposed virtues of unrestricted access to guns. They see the evil consequences of the rule of guns in deaths, injuries, addiction, and despair among children and young adults.
It is also likely that informed Latinos are justifiably suspicious of the argument-advanced by the NRA in particular-that "we" need military-style guns to protect ourselves from a wide spectrum of imagined apocalyptic events. These events include the rise of a "tyrannical" government, civil disorder after natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes, and an amorphous threat from hordes of rampaging "gangs." The unspoken (at least in public) undercurrent of this argument is an ugly fear of how "the other"-Latinos, other immigrants, young people with their liberating notions about sexual orientation and immigrant rights-are demonstrably weakening the old Anglo-Saxon grip on power in the United States. The argument has special appeal among nativists and other extremists who see danger in every non-white face, and have organized their own well-armed paramilitary forces to keep unwelcome faces out of America. The faces that this world of extremists fear are brown, black, and other frightening shades of non-white skin color, interpreted as if every one were a criminal gangster or part of a pillaging "wave" of foreign culture.
Finally, Americans of all ethnicities, races, and places of birth fall victim every day to gun violence in all of its pandemic forms in the United States, from mass shootings to domestic violence. About 87 Americans die every single day from gunshot injury-consistently half of them suicides-and about twice as many are shot but survive their injuries, usually with lasting psychological and physiological damage. Latinos are over-represented in this carnage. Mass shootings demand attention from the news media. But the vast majority of daily gun death and injury in America is ignored by the news media. It cannot, however, be ignored by those among whom it is epidemic, which includes too many Latino communities.
For whatever reason, Latinos are fortunate to share a healthy perspective on guns-the widespread understanding that what is good for the gun industry is bad for Latinos. As Latinos continue to grow in political strength, they will bring a stronger voice and a powerful force for change to the national debate, which is now bogged down in Washington because of the familiar self-interested caution of career politicians. The ranks of these cautious politicians-who value their own reelection over saving the lives of children-include most Republicans. But timidity is bipartisan. Career gun control equivocators include Democratic "leaders" like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and perennial "third way" gun control appeasers like New York's Senator Chuck Schumer. (Note on full disclosure: I worked for then Rep. Schumer on the staff of the House Crime and Criminal Justice Subcommittee between 1993 and 1997.)
The NRA's reliable "gun rights" supporters are thus not the only politicians who ought to be looking over their shoulders. Self-proclaimed "progressive" and "moderate" politicians who offer glib token support but are missing in action when the going gets tough on issues that affect the real lives of real Latinos will be among those called to account for their inaction. Gun control will be high among those issues.
Tom Diaz is a writer who lives in Washington, DC. He is the author of the just-released book,The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It (The New Press, 2013). He also wrote No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement (University of Michigan Press 2009). He can be reached at Digger2004@hotmail.com.