Young Black men carry guns when:
* They fear for their safety
* They cannot trust the police

Young Black men carry guns illegally when:
* All of the above
* They cannot afford a legal gun / haven't registered it / have a criminal record, usually for something non-violent like drug possession

If a non-criminal feels unsafe, they will carry a gun. If they cannot carry legally, they will carry illegally. The vast majority do not intend to use it to commit crimes. But they end up victims.😢

When people feel safer, and people trust police more*, they just stop carrying guns as often. This has been successfully implemented in city after city. Boston. East Palo Alto. Detroit. LA.

Policing is so violent and unaccountable in the US, that the most reliable and consistent way to increase trust in police, is to decrease the number of contacts, citations, and arrests.🙂🙃

* People aren't foolish to distrust the police, especially Black people. Especially in Chicago.

A man that lives in a dangerous neighborhood and is carrying an illegal firearm for protection, will run if he knows that any police contact will land him in jail for 5 years. You already know how that run often ends.

That decreases trust in police further.

Even if he is not shot, going to jail for 5 years doesn't make his neighborhood safer. His dependents will sink further into poverty, furthering the cycle.

Taking his weapon away doesn't make him feel safer either. He will get another one.

To reduce illegal (and legal) gun ownership effectively, you have to do both things:
* Make the neighborhood safer
* Reduce police brutality, and reduce the systemic harms of policing.

This has worked in every city it's been tried in, except Baltimore, New Orleans, and Chicago (Let me know when you see it). In those cities, at least historically, the cops Just. Don't. Care.🤷🏿‍♂️

Once you understand how these systems interact, you see that police brutality *creates* gun violence.🙂🙃

Getting guns out of the hands of young Black men is important not because they don't deserve the right to defend themselves. If anyone in the US should have the right to defend themselves with a gun, it's the demographic most likely to be shot and killed. 🤷🏿‍♂️

But the problem is, simply having a gun escalates confrontations. It *increases* the chance that you will get into a shootout with a multiple killer that just does not care about you, himself, or anything. You will lose, and you will die.

@Aviva_Gary

Honestly, that works!

Most of the calls that police respond to, don't require an armed person to respond.

More and more cities are moving away from "policing" and towards "public safety." By offloading more of these contacts to unarmed folks, the harm of policing is lessened.

School resource officers have not stopped a single mass shooting, but have arrested thousands of Black kids and destroyed their faith in cops. Most Black folks' distrust of cops comes from lived experience.