The Las Vegas mass casualty attack - one of the deadliest in modern US history - has brought gun control to the forefront of Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Northam has pushed for universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, while at the same time reinstating a former law limiting handgun purchases to one per month. Many gun control bills have been introduced in recent General Assembly sessions, but the Republican-controlled legislature consistently blocks efforts to add new restrictions on the purchase and possession of firearms.

Perhaps it's counterintuitive to say this, but for Virginia (and the country,) gun control responses to mass casualty attacks are not true solutions. As an example, Richmond’s poverty rate among children is the second-highest in Virginia, and as recently as 2015, one in four Richmond residents lived in poverty. Gun regulation won't solve a problem interdependent on social and economic factors. Gun control only treats the symptoms, not the cause.

You see, violence is a symptom of poverty. When you are poor, your opportunities to escape poverty are exceptionally limited.

When one of those “thugs” in Gilpin Court need to pay rent, or feed their family, or just find something to eat themselves, and there is nowhere else to turn, they turn to crime, and that can usually mean violence. Making stricter regulations for guns won’t resolve the underlying reasons behind much of the shootings in Richmond (or Virginia, or the rest of the country for that matter.)

So no, I don't think gun control is where we should focus all our energy. "Matthew?! What're you talking about?!!!" "Are you one of "thoughts and prayers" people?" No, I think they’re equally ridiculous. And the liberals don't have it right here either.

Bear with me for a second.

The typical form of gun control means writing more criminal laws, creating new forms of criminal law, and therefore creating more criminals and more reasons for police to suspect people of crimes. More than that, it means creating yet more pretexts for the continued militarization of police. Searching for guns can easily become pretextual, a stand-in for some general prediction of risk, danger, or lawlessness. In other words, police would use selective enforcement, where enforcement includes obtrusive searches based on existing prejudices about who is and isn’t dangerous (think stop and frisk.)

This is a problem because the police already operate with barely constrained force in poor, minority neighborhoods (hello Ferguson, Missouri). From police using military equipment in non-tactical situations,(hello Standing Rock), to stop-and-frisk, to mass incarceration, to parole monitoring; the police operate a cache of programs that subject these populations to several layers of coercion. As a consequence, more than 7 million Americans are subject to some form of correctional control, an extremely disproportionate number of whom are from poor and minority communities. Following in stride with national trends, Virginia has an increasingly terrible record (SEE BELOW).

People of color, particularly African Americans, are over‐represented at each stage of the Virginia criminal justice system. The Justice Policy Institute recently put out a report on the Commonwealth’s correctional systems. In Virginia, African Americans comprise roughly 20 percent of the adult population. In the justice system, they comprise 47.4 percent of all arrests 76.2 percent of robbery arrests, 52.2 percent of aggravated assault arrests 60.8 percent of state prison inmates - for every white person incarcerated in Virginia, six African Americans are behind bars.

A yawning gap exists between the justification for gun control and its most likely effect. Based on history alone, there is no reason to expect fair enforcement of gun control laws. Why? Because how our society polices depends not on the laws themselves but on how the police - and the criminal justice system - decide to enforce the law against the citizenry. Once more, think stop and frisk, think Especially given how many guns there are in the country, gun law enforcement will be selective. That is to say, they will be unfairly enforced,

Once individuals find themselves arrested, “gun control” typically appears as a reason for increasing punishment. Gun possession can be used, for example, to enhance sentences for other crimes. Gun charges are also a part of the excessive and racially unequal over-charging practices that not only contribute to rising incarceration rates but also forces individuals away from trial and into plea bargains. As the Washington Post reported in 2014, “47.3 percent of those convicted of federal gun crimes were black — a racial disparity larger than any other class of federal crimes, including drug crimes.”

Indeed, for most communities of color, being the ”good guys with guns” can actually cause more harm than good. Look no further than Philando Castile as an example.

So instead of solely focusing on guns, we should focus on the structural inequalities and material conditions that are at the root of these problems. Research shows that areas of the country experiencing the highest incidents of gun homicide are marked by intense poverty, low levels of education, and racial segregation. Again, violence is a symptom of poverty.

We can approach shootings as a criminal justice problem or as a public health/social welfare problem, and that’s was missing in the discussion. It bears repeating, social inequality and income inequality are to a large extent fueling the gun violence in the country. Richmond is trying to combat its gun violence with a new targeted ad campaign. Even that though, misses the point. RPC wants residents to respect Richmond? Maybe the residents need respect first.