The past week has been a harrowing one for everyone in North America, and obviously more so for our neighbours to the South. Two separate and undeniably unnecessary killings of Black men by US law enforcement one day apart and the appalling retaliatory attack by a Black army veteran upon Dallas police officers that left five officers dead have exposed once again the vastness of the continuing racial divide among the world’s most prosperous and well-armed populace.
There is of course no shortage of commentators in Canada who have angrily and fairly dismissed the notion that Canadians can regard this inflection point in civil society as merely an American phenomenon. The continuing racial biases evident in the practice of carding in my home city of Toronto and the demonstrably callous treatment of crimes against our indigenous populations throughout the country are more than sufficient evidence of our own shortcomings in our policing practices and our systemic inclinations. American history may be more infamous for its race-based injustices, but no society has fully addressed the remnants of our less enlightened traditions.
That being said, there are aspects of the contemporary American experience with these social issues that are uniquely problematic. The festering racial tensions between police and marginalized communities become far more dangerous in the context of concealed carry laws that turn even routine traffic stops or misdemeanor encounters into potentially deadly interactions. It is more than a coincidence that both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the victims of the police shootings in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, respectively, were carrying concealed weapons in accordance with the laws of Louisiana and Minnesota. That is not to blame the victims, who no one has suggested did anything to manifest a threat to the police officers that they encountered, but only to point out the fraught context in which Americans must work out the lingering symptoms of racial discord.
Similarly, the Dallas police force did not find itself confronted by an angry and arguably mentally ill young Black man brandishing a knife, but one carrying an AR-15, a weapon that demonstrated very devastatingly its ability to generate mass casualties. In the US, even the outlet of healthy or even angry protest is compromised by the reality of a heavily armed population on both sides of the racial divide.
Despite the understandable anger and not infrequently intemperate excesses, the dialogue around race issues in North American society today is a healthy and inevitable precursor to change. These sorts of revolutionary times are, however, unduly dangerous where they take place in a society that has a pathological yet constitutional belief in the wisdom of gun ownership as both a source of individual protection and means for promoting social progress. Conflict has been and always will be the catalyst to social progress and, among the increasingly heterogeneous communities in our cities and nations is bound to become even more frequent. If it is truly fundamental to the unity of the US that the revolutionary means as well as spirit of the American Founding Fathers be forever honoured, let the laws of the land put a flintlock musket in the hands of every citizen. At least they are hard to conceal and even harder to aim and reload.
