Guns in America
One person's Second Amendment is another's C felony
In the background of everything else that happened in the last week, the Brooklyn DA’s office is celebrating.
America clearly has a gun problem. It has a violence problem. The systemic racism that leaves 13-year-old children dead at the hands of state actors also means that the people who bear the brunt of the somewhat hypocritical flip side of state violence—years and years in prison for the mere possession of weapons that are legally purchased in many states and glorified in all 50—are of course Black and Brown young men that grow up with the knowledge that the government is more than happy to put a bullet through their heart if they so much as look at a police officer wrong.
This man the DA’s office is so proud to have convicted was pulled over in Canarsie, a neighborhood that is roughly 80 percent Black, for “excessively tinted windows,” then arrested for driving with a suspended license before anyone found a pistol on him. It was loaded, but there’s no suggestion that he used it. Still, possession of a loaded firearm is a C violent felony in New York, and the man will lose somewhere between three and a half and fifteen years of his life to a New York state penitentiary.
I don’t particularly love the Second Amendment, or believe that people should be free to carry guns around, concealed or no, but I also don’t think that the solution to America’s gun problem is putting individual people in cages for years for simply possessing a gun. That’s not doing anything except ruining the life of that one person and his family.
Layered on top of this is the federal/state divide. State gun cases are kind of mickey mouse. State cases often involve a single gun, maybe two, sloppy police work, etc. Much more than that and suddenly the feds are involved. Theoretically, federal prosecutors are trying to take down gun trafficking and the real supply of illegal weapons that eventually trickle down to a guy in Canarsie with tinted windows.
The problem with the feds is that they dabble in trying to stem the supply, but also spend a lot of time prosecuting something colloquially called “felon in possession,” which means simply that you’ve previously been convicted of a felony and thus possessing a gun is suddenly a new federal felony (It’s 18 USC 922(g)(1) if you want to give it a look). In Q4 of 2020, the most recent quarter for which there were statistics, more than 50 percent of people convicted of firearms offenses on the federal level were Black. The average sentence for a federal firearms possession charge in 2020 was four years in federal prison.*
Even if the U.S. Attorneys are not systematically discriminating against those who they choose to prosecute for this (which, sure), the category of “people convicted of a felony” is already hopelessly racist. We’re back to where we started: with the guy in the black neighborhood being pulled over for tinted windows, arrested for a suspended license (also racist!), now a felon. This is before we even begin to ask questions about personal safety and violence and community resources. It’s racist turtles all the way down.
For all the collective millennia in prison people are doing for gun possession in America, it doesn’t really seem to be helping our problem. Whatever the solution to gun violence is in America, criminalizing possession isn’t it. Criminalizing possession doesn’t amount to much more than the perpetuation of state violence against people of color, most especially young Black men.
Then again, there is always the possibility that that’s the point.
n.b.: I can’t find the data to separate out felon in possession, I’m only finding possession charges generally. To find it go to the U.S. Sentencing Commission dashboard, then go to “Major Crime Types” then “Firearms.” As an aside, I’m pretty sure the Trump Admin messed with this USSC data, my memory of it is that it was a lot more granular w/r/t types of crimes, etc, a few years ago, but maybe I’m imagining things.
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