Mychal Denzel Smith | The Nation

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer meets with President Obama in 2010. (White House Photo/Pete Souza.)

Editor's Note: With this post we welcome Mychal Denzel Smith, who has already been a guest-blogger and contributor to TheNation.com, back to our site as a regular blogger! You'll find Mychal's work, focusing on racial justice, criminal justice, and more, here at least once per week.

The United States Senate, as it is wont to do, failed to find enough votes to pass legislation that a majority of Americans support. In this instance, it was for expanded background checks, the one gun control measure that, since the tragic shooting in Newtown, seemed likely to become law. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and our Congress, if nothing is else, wills its way into ineffectiveness with ease.

Thus far, it has been left up to individual states to craft their own gun control legislation, and a few have stepped up to the plate. Colorado, New York, Maryland and Connecticut have all passed new gun control laws, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Arizona has also taken up the issue of gun control. On Monday (April 29), Governor Jan Brewer, of SB1070 and finger-wagging fame, signed a bill that prevents cities and counties conducting gun-buyback events from destroying the weapons they obtain and forces them to sell the guns to licensed firearm dealers, to then be resold to the public. According to state Representative Brenda Barton, the Republican author of the measure, the bill is meant to “clarify” already existing laws that require the government to sell weapons that they have seized. According to the Arizona Daily Sun, the “law also covers ‘found property’ which is defined as anything recovered, lost or abandoned that is not needed as evidence,” and by “adding the word ‘surrendered’ to what is considered found property” it now covers even those guns.

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“Any chance of cities or counties conducting future gun-buyback programs is about to evaporate,” says the Sun—and they’re exactly right. This bill has the effect of turning Arizona’s gun-buyback program, aimed at getting guns off the street, into a recycling initiative. Additionally, Brewer signed a separate bill prohibiting local governments from keeping lists of people who own firearms, though no evidence exists that any city was keeping this type of record.

As someone who is firmly anti-gun/anti–Second Amendment, background checks are not all that satisfying, but this Arizona law is an affront to progress of any kind. But there are two lessons to be learned here. One is that gun control—meaningful gun control—legislation has to be a federal priority. This isn’t an issue where we can afford to have fifty different states going about their business in fifty completely different ways, when the ability to obtain a gun through one state’s lax laws renders a nearby state’s stricter gun laws moot. Federalism is not our friend on gun control.

And second, even as public opinion shifts toward “common sense” gun laws, the energy and organization still lies on the pro-gun side. The governor’s office in Arizona claims they received more than 1900 pleas for Brewer to sign this new measure, an effort organized by the Arizona Citizens Defense League. On the other hand, they only received twenty-five messages in favor of a veto. The poll numbers are one thing, but political movement requires actual movement.

If we’re truly exhausted by seeing headlines such as this one, where 2-year-olds are the victims of gun violence, those of us on the side of restricting access to guns have to become just as vigilant in our cause as those who would interpret the Second Amendment to essentially mean “a chicken in every pot and a gun in every hand.”

For more on another pressing reform issue—immigration—read Allison Kilkenny on May Day rallies in New York City.

US drone strikes have killed innocent civilians around the world. (AP Photo/Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt, US Air Force.)

After the shooting death of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old honor student who had, just a week before her tragic death, performed along with her high school band in the president’s inauguration ceremonies, the Black Youth Project started a Change.org petition asking President Obama to come to Chicago and address the gun violence plaguing the city. Initially, I read it skeptically. There’s a tendency to want the president to respond to every crisis everywhere, even when his intervention would do little to help. What real impact would a presidential speech or two have in reducing the violence? None that I can see. But that really isn’t the point.

The president should go to Chicago. Even if it’s not for Hadiya’s funeral, which the first lady will attend, he should go to his adopted hometown sometime in the near future, meet with local community leaders, his old chief of staff turned mayor, family and friends who have lost someone to guns, and children of all ages that currently live in fear of their own neighborhood. He should offer them, as he did the families in Newtown, reassurance that they are not alone. He should use the bully pulpit, as Cathy Cohen told The Washington Post, “to command the attention of the country, raising their consciousness about the life and death issues facing young people in Chicago.” He should listen intently to their concerns and engage them in dialogue about their ideas for solutions. He should get the country to focus on them, care about their future and stop writing them off. They should feel like someone cares.

Then he should explain to them when and why he thinks their government has right to kill them.

He should tell them about Anwar al-Awlaki and why, like Hadiya, his son has become a teenage symbol of a culture of violence. He should explain who makes the decisions and what criteria they use to determine who poses a threat so imminent the United States ignores habeas corpus in favor of unmanned drone strikes. He should explain why, as David Cole writes in the Post, this policy remains “secret in most aspects, involves no judicial review, has resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, has been employed far from any battlefield and has sparked deep anti-American resentment in countries where we can ill afford it.” They should understand what’s being done in their name. He should ask them if they’re OK with that.

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When he leaves Chicago, the president should travel to Pakistan, and Yemen and Somalia, where he should deliver similar speeches to the families and friends of those who have lost someone to a drone. He should explain to them the endgame. He should tell them how long this is going to last. He should tell them how many Al Qaeda number-twos we have to kill before we feel safe enough to end the “war on terror.” The president should tell them he cares about their lives and futures just as much as he cares about the citizens in his own country. They should know how long their kids have to live in fear of the sky.

I don’t wish to conflate the issues and act is if they are precisely the same, but I also don’t wish to pretend the violence abroad isn’t reflected in the violence in our streets and vice versa. And I don’t expect that this would put an end to drone strikes, targeted killings, assassinations and the like, much the same way I don’t anticipate a speech or two about gun violence in Chicago would put an end to shooting deaths there. What I’m suggesting is the president, and the rest of us, recognize our contradictions and be more vigilant in addressing violent behavior no matter where it’s directed and by whom.

Obama should go to Chicago and ask the country to hold itself accountable for the violence we’ve allowed to terrorize a community. Then he should hold himself accountable, too.

We need to take more steps to make sure what happened to Trayvon Martin won't happen again, Mychal Denzel Smith writes.

Beyonce performs during the half-time show of the NFL Super Bowl XLVII football game in New Orleans, Louisiana, February 3, 2013. Reuters/Mike Segar

As a non-Beyoncé fan, even I have to admit that her halftime show at the Super Bowl was spectacular. It’s a grand stage built for grand performances, and if there was any doubt before this, she left none after that she is indeed the pre-eminent pop star of her generation. But all some people could see was a sex machine.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing for the National Review Online’s blog, was very concerned about Beyoncé’s performance. Lopez wants to know: “Why can’t we have a national entertainment moment that does not include a mother gyrating in a black teddy?” Because over the course of a thirteen-minute display of pyrotechnics, choreography, holograms and ten-piece all-female band, the only thing that really happened was a woman stood on stage shaking her ass, right?

Lopez found the display gratuitous, saying it was “no surprise that men made comments about stripper poles and putting dollar bills through their TV sets.” Instead of condemning those men for making such sexist remarks, it’s Beyoncé’s fault for eliciting that response.

What Beyoncé did was own her sexuality, for herself and no one else, in a public space—and it freaked some people out. Whether you think Beyoncé was “self-objectifying” is a question of whether it’s possible for a woman to publicly embrace her sexuality without being defined by the hetero-male gaze. As a hetero-male, I hope I’m not speaking out of turn when I say: Not everything is about us. In fact, most things aren’t, we just pretend they are so we can feel good about ourselves.

But Lopez seems most disappointed not in Beyoncé, but in the first lady. After the performance Michelle Obama sent out a tweet praising Beyoncé, saying the singer was “phenomenal” and that she was “proud of her.” For Lopez, the first lady’s open adulation for Beyoncé sends the wrong message, as Beyoncé is a role model in some respects but, according to Lopez, an “example of cultural surrender, rather than leadership” in others. Keli Goff advanced a similar argument last year after Michelle Obama told People magazine that if she could be anyone in the world it would be Beyoncé. Goff worried what message that could be sending to the young black girls who look up to the first lady.

First, we have to get over the idea that we can choose for our young people who is and is not a role model. They will identify with whom and what speaks to them directly and helps them make sense of the world on their own. The role of the adults in their lives is to be sure they’re exposed to as many ideas and ways of thinking as possible.

Second, Obama’s embrace of Beyoncé is somehow seen as tarnishing Beyoncé’s own image, but even more so, that of the first lady. In the American consciousness, particularly for conservatives, the first lady should be the embodiment of all the puritanical implications of the latter part of her title. This precludes her from being sexual in any way—even if it’s only vicariously through a famous pop star. When she falls short of those ideals, someone will always be there to publicly admonish her for it.

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The assumption underlying both Lopez’s and Goff’s outcries is that by associating with what they consider less than desirable elements, Obama invites criticism on herself. It’s a long-standing idea among groups traditionally discriminated against in this country that if they present themselves as above reproach—twice or three times as worthy of praise—those in power will have no choice but to see and accept them as fully human productive members of society. It’s a politics of respectability that puts the onus of ending discrimination on those who experience the discrimination, through individual action and responsibility.

But that just doesn’t work. As a black woman, the first lady will come up against many forms of racist and sexist discrimination that replicate themselves in the way she is discussed and critiqued in public. Her accomplishments don’t protect her from these attacks; in fact, the attacks are intensified precisely because of what she has achieved. This is how systems of oppression work, and it's how they'll continue to work until those who benefit from them disavow them and the privilege that is bestowed upon them. No matter the first lady’s actions, they won’t cure racism and sexism.

Lopez says, “I so want the Obamas to be leaders on building a culture of marriage and fatherhood and human dignity.” As public figures, the Obamas already represent all of those things, as do Beyoncé and her husband. But if you’re determined to find a way to blame people for their own marginalization, you will.

Dave Zirin writes about a much less entertaining spectacle at the Super Bowl—the power outage—and what it says about economic inequality in this country.

Edwina Grant who lost her son to gun violence holds his picture as she demonstrates with CeaseFirePa at a rally in the Pennsylvania Capital building Wednesday, January 23, 2013, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

In 1995, Chicago resident Shirley Chambers lost her first child to gun violence. Her 18-year-old son, Carlos, was shot and killed by a 16-year-old high school classmate. Five years later, her 15-year-old daughter, Latoya, was killed by a 13-year-old boy. Only two months after his sister was gunned down, Shirley Chambers’s son Jerome was shot and killed outside of the Cabrini-Green housing projects in which they lived. He was 23-years-old. Jerome’s death left Shirley with one surviving child, Ronnie. “I’d pray for God to protect Ronnie and keep him safe day and night,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times. She was speaking to them on the occasion of Ronnie’s death, shot and killed this past Sunday at the age of 34.

Ronnie is one of seven killed and six wounded in Chicago over the weekend. He is one of forty homicides in the city during the month of January. He will be his mother’s last. Over the course of eighteen years, Shirley Chambers has had to bury all four of her children as a result of gun violence.

On Monday, President Obama met with police chiefs from Newtown, Connecticut; Oak Creek, Wisconsin; Aurora, Colorado; and Tucson, Arizona to discuss how to prevent the types of mass shootings these cities experienced recently. Because for all the talk about gun control as of late, the goal has really been fewer mass shootings. It says as much in the press release that preceded the president’s press conference on January 16, where he signed twenty-three executive orders and introduced his proposals for congressional legislation on gun control—the intent behind these measures is “to better protect our children and our communities from tragic mass shootings like those in Newtown, Aurora, Oak Creek, and Tucson.” There is no national conversation on how to end gun deaths like those of Shirley Chambers’s children, or the more than 500 in Chicago last year or the thousands more just like them across the country. Spoken or not, the sentiment appears to be that gun violence is more acceptable in certain places among certain people than it is in others.

It may be that addressing this type of violence is better handled by local governments, as opposed to on a federal level, so legislation can be crafted to the specific needs of each city. To that end, Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing for new ordinances that would, according to the Sun-Times, “broaden the requirement for reporting the loss, theft, sale or transfer of firearms to all gun owners in all of Cook County and double the jail time for an array of gun violations.” This new requirement of reporting lost, stolen, destroyed, or sold firearms would extend to all gun owners, not just those with city firearms permits, as currently constituted. It would also extend to Cook County, which includes the areas immediately surrounding Chicago, a move that is constitutionally questionable, but has the support of County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. The hope is that this will stop the flow of illegal guns into Chicago and the hands of gang members.

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But whether it’s Chicago, Oak Creek, Detroit, New York or Tucson, the problem is the same: guns. There are too many of them and they are too easy to get. There should be less of them and they should be much harder to get… for everyone. As I’ve said here before, the idea that keeping guns out of the hands of “bad” or “dangerous” people will solve the problem of gun violence rests on the fallacy that “good” people never do the wrong thing. It’s not the people that make guns dangerous, but the other way around.

In 2000, then Newark, New Jersey city councilman Cory Booker said in a C-SPAN interview that in his urban environment he saw “little to no need for guns at all” and that “if I had the power to do so,” he would ban all guns. As mayor of Newark, Booker, according to the Star-Ledger, said, “My experience over the last seven years as mayor has given me a very practical, nuanced, data-driven and experienced view as to what policy works to help empower people and advance our city.”

The problem is, thus far, “practical” hasn’t worked. “Practical” has only lessened the epidemic. “Practical” has Shirley Chambers carrying extra flowers when she goes to visit her children at the cemetery. “Practical” is damn lethal.

We are a nation of the Second Amendment and guns. But we don’t have to be. 

Mychal Denzel Smith last wrote on how widespread poverty pushes black men to strive for football stardom—despite the mounting risks of traumatic brain injury.