Donald Trump fanned white racism when he posted an online graphic titled "USA Crime Statistics - 2015." It showed a masked black man holding gun and said, falsely: "Whites killed by blacks - 81 percent."
It was an outrageous untruth. FBI statistics say that, among white American murder victims, only 15 percent are killed by blacks. Trump's misinformation evidently had just one purpose: to incite white hostility toward blacks.
Actually, guns are a terrible curse upon American blacks - perhaps the worst health menace faced by black Americans. Notre Dame University philosopher Gary Gutting wrote:
"Black people in the 'bad parts' of our cities have to live with utterly unacceptable levels of gun violence. In 2010, blacks, who make up only 13 percent of the population, were 55 percent of gun homicide victims. It's no surprise that blacks favor stricter gun controls considerably more than whites do."
For example, Dr. Gutting said Chicago had about 2,700 shootings in 2015, more than 400 fatal - but nearly all of them happened in the city's African-American ghettos. Many whites shrug and think gun murder is "their problem." The philosopher said many whites "haven't realized the extent to which gun violence is destroying urban black communities."
A different analyst, Christopher Ingraham, wrote in The Washington Post about "the sometimes drastic differences in how different populations experience gun violence and gun ownership in their lives."
"Among whites," he said, "77 percent of gun deaths are suicides. But among black Americans, 82 percent of gun deaths are homicides."
Whites favor the "right to bear arms" twice as strongly as blacks do. "About 41 percent of white households own guns, compared to just 19 percent of black households, according to a 2014 Pew survey," Ingraham wrote. He added:
"Black parents (39 percent) are nearly twice as likely as white parents (22 percent) to say they worry about their child getting shot. When it comes to their kids, black parents worry more about shootings than about drug or alcohol use or depression. Among white parents, the opposite is true."
If white Americans suffered gun tragedies at the same rate as blacks, perhaps public pressure would force conservative politicians to stop bowing before the gun lobby and take real steps to protect people from this nation's horrible rate of gun killing.