Complex reality versus Simple idealism

A very substantive article, Shaneen Allen, race and gun control by Radley Balko. Gun Control and Race are topics that tend to attract comment from committed ideologues who aren't so much seeking to persuade or convince but rather to drown out. Consequently, I tend to want to know the background and perspective of the author to apply some sort of filtering as to what they are presenting. Balko's name rings a vague bell so I looked him up on Wikipedia. He appears to be one of the rare and dwindling breed of investigative reporters who go where the evidence takes them.

In this article, he highlights three issues I focus on - 1) trade-offs in decision-making, 2) the importance of prioritization, and 3) the delicate balance of having enough variance in a system to facilitate evolution under changing circumstances and yet as little as possible to facilitate efficiency of achieved outcomes.

In this case, you can argue till the cows come home about the relative merits of gun control and social justice initiatives. What you can't effectively argue is that the two aren't linked and that what you do in the case of one won't have consequences on the other.

Balko uses the case of Shaneen Allen as the foundation of his discussion.

Last October, Shaneen Allen, 27, was pulled over in Atlantic County, N.J. The officer who pulled her over says she made an unsafe lane change. During the stop, Allen informed the officer that she was a resident of Pennsylvania and had a conceal carry permit in her home state. She also had a handgun in her car. Had she been in Pennsylvania, having the gun in the car would have been perfectly legal. But Allen was pulled over in New Jersey, home to some of the strictest gun control laws in the United States.

Allen is a black single mother. She has two kids. She has no prior criminal record. Before her arrest, she worked as a phlebologist. After she was robbed two times in the span of about a year, she purchased the gun to protect herself and her family. There is zero evidence that Allen intended to use the gun for any other purpose. Yet Allen was arrested. She spent 40 days in jail before she was released on bail. She’s now facing a felony charge that, if convicted, would bring a three-year mandatory minimum prison term.

Balko points out that enforcing federal gun control (appealing to gun control advocates) has disparate racial impacts (appalling to social justice advocates). Trade-offs:

Although white people occasionally do become the victims of overly broad gun laws (for example, see the outrageous prosecution of Brian Aitken, also in New Jersey), the typical person arrested for gun crimes is more likely to have the complexion of Shaneen Allen than, say, Sarah Palin. Last year, 47.3 percent of those convicted for federal gun crimes were black — a racial disparity larger than any other class of federal crimes, including drug crimes. In a 2011 report on mandatory minimum sentencing for gun crimes, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that blacks were far more likely to be charged and convicted of federal gun crimes that carry mandatory minimum sentences. They were also more likely to be hit with “enhancement” penalties that added to their sentences. In fact, the racial discrepancy for mandatory minimums was even higher than the aforementioned disparity for federal gun crimes in general:

Variance in the system:

Much of this boils down to professional discretion. When a person victimizes another person with a gun, the offending person has already committed a crime. And in nearly every state and under federal law, it is already an additional crime to use or possess a gun while doing something that is already a crime. So when gun control advocates say we need to crack down on gun offenders, or when they propose that we create new gun crimes, they aren’t suggesting we crack down on people who use guns to rob banks or to commit murders. We already go after those people. What they’re proposing is that we target people who possess, sell or transport guns not because they want to hurt people with them, but for reasons ranging from what most reasonable people would believe to be justifiable (like Shaneen Allen) to what gun control proponents would likely consider objectionable (the gun shop owners and gun manufacturers who make money selling weapons).

Prioritization: which is more important, achieving higher enforcement of laws by giving law enforcement and the judicial system more latitude for individual discretion in decision-making or reducing the number of manifest injustices arising from such discretion.

It will also mean giving a lot more discretion to law enforcement officials and prosecutors. When someone robs a bank with a gun or kills someone with a gun, there’s no debate about who needs to be investigated and prosecuted. When a police agency is charged to seek out and prosecute people who are illegally possessing or transferring guns, they’re required to use their own discretion when it comes to what communities to target and what methods they’ll use to target them.

Inevitably, this will manifest as sting operations against communities with little political clout. (Or, just as troubling, deliberately targeting people for political reasons.) Just this week, an incredible investigation by USA Today reporter Brad Heath demonstrated just how this plays out in the real world:

The nation’s top gun-enforcement agency overwhelmingly targeted racial and ethnic minorities as it expanded its use of controversial drug sting operations, a USA TODAY investigation shows.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has more than quadrupled its use of those stings during the past decade, quietly making them a central part of its attempts to combat gun crime. The operations are designed to produce long prison sentences for suspects enticed by the promise of pocketing as much as $100,000 for robbing a drug stash house that does not actually exist.

At least 91% of the people agents have locked up using those stings were racial or ethnic minorities, USA TODAY found after reviewing court files and prison records from across the United States. Nearly all were either black or Hispanic. That rate is far higher than among people arrested for big-city violent crimes, or for other federal robbery, drug and gun offenses.

And yet one more set of trade-offs. Do you give more power for coercive enforcement of laws to the centralized authority when there is a track record of centralized authority abusing that power.

In the 1990s, gun rights activists accused the ATF of explicitly targeting people for their advocacy (with plenty of evidence to back their claims), often with violent and destructive raids on their homes. You needn’t be a Second Amendment purist to understand the implications of using the discretion that comes with enforcing victimless crimes to target people for their political views, any more than you need to be a racial justice activist to understand the injustice of using the same discretion and the same laws to primarily target people of color, people whose mental capacity makes them particularly susceptible to persuasion, or people who lack the clout or resources to defend themselves.

One could argue that the gun laws don’t need to be enforced in a racially discriminatory manner or in the catastrophically inept manner we’ve seen at the ATF. But you enforce the gun laws with the institutions you have, not the institutions you want. If we’re going to enforce gun laws that require discretion on the part of investigators and prosecutors — and add new laws to boot — we can only consider the demonstrated history of how investigators and prosecutors have used that discretion, not some idealized prosecutor or ATF investigator that we’d want to be in charge.

Balko treats a complex subject with the respect it deserves. For all the desire for quick fixes to achieve single outcomes, it is much more complex than that.