On the same day Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Foxx was in Miami for a march in remembrance of the senseless killing of a 17-year-old Florida boy, first lady Michelle Obama went to Chicago to attend the funeral of a 15-year-old girl whose slaying also tests this nation's sobriety.
Only a nation impaired by selfish individualism can long ignore the bloody carnage that links Trayvon Martin to Hadiya Pendleton.
Martin was killed a year ago as he walked the streets of a gated community in Sanford, Fla., with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head during a light rain. George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman who was armed with a 9-mm handgun, thought the black teenager looked suspicious and followed him.
During a brief struggle, Zimmerman pumped a single bullet into Martin's chest.
Pendleton -- a high school majorette -- was shot in the back while standing in a neighborhood park just a mile from President Obama's Chicago home. Her death came a week after she had gone to Washington to march in the re-elected president's inaugural parade.
Her killer, who is thought to have mistaken Pendleton for a member of a rival gang, has not been captured.
American pandemic
The killing of young blacks is an American pandemic.
In 2011, the last year for which the FBI has complete data, 1,668 blacks under the age of 22 were killed in this country. That's more than triple the 469 American servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan that year. An average of eight children was killed each day in 2011 -- and half of them were black -- according to the Children's Defense Fund.
In 2008 and 2009, black children and teenagers were just 15 percent of the nation's population but 45 percent of young people killed by guns. If that doesn't cause a churning in your gut, maybe this will: The leading cause of death for black males ages 15-19 in those years came from the barrel of a gun.
Blacks in this age group were eight times more likely than whites and two-and-a-half times more likely than Hispanics to be killed by gunfire, the Children's Defense Fund said in "Protect Children, Not Guns," a 2012 report on effects of gun violence on this nation's children.
Even more shocking, the Washington-based children's advocacy group said, the number of black children killed by gunfire since 1979 is nearly 13 times more than the number of blacks who were lynched in this country between 1882 and 1968.
270 killed in Chicago
In Chicago alone, more than 270 children have been killed since 2007. And most of them were killed by other blacks, as are most of the nation's homicide victims. But the responsibility for this violence -- and the obligation to do something about it -- belongs to all of us.
This slaughter is also the fault of those who think the answer to youth violence is more prisons, not better schools. It stains the hands of those who oppose efforts to keep weapons meant for war from being sold as freely as a loaf of bread. It is inextricably tied to the members of Congress who kowtow to the National Rifle Association even as the epidemic of school shootings proves that there is no haven for any of our children from the unchecked gun violence that was once seen as largely a fixture of America's ghettos.
While young blacks are now disproportionately the victims of gun violence, this bloodshed is a cancer that -- if left unchecked -- will spread to the cul-de-sacs and bedroom communities into which those who think this is not their problem have retreated.
Source: http://www.guampdn.com/article/20130216/OPINION02/302160312/1014/rss03
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