Last weekend there was an example. There were no dozens of mass media helicopters covering. In Philadelphia, eight people were shot and taken to the hospital overnight Friday, with seven more shootings and four more homicides into Saturday morning.
The daily news report tells stories of bloody streets in Hunting Park, Kensington, Kingsessing. Virtually most “unattended” Philadelphia urban areas are the scene of persistent armed violence where homicide rates are often 10 times higher than the national average.
An interesting view on urban armed violence has been offered through digital media by journalist Glenn Ellis, a medical ethicist, researcher, lecturer and president of Strategies for Well-Being, LLC, a global consultancy that specializes in health education, equity, disparities, advocacy, policy and communication.
From his point of view, urban community gun violence is a massive part of the epidemic of armed violence in our country, but, we’ve reach a point where it is too frequently overlooked within the broader gun violence debate, which often focuses, at least in the press, on mass shootings.
It is not only one problem
Glenn Ellis, who is a health and wellness educator and writer, points out that as a nation we are mistakenly talking about gun violence in the United States as if it is a single problem. “But it’s really at least four different ones: suicides, urban gun violence, domestic violence, and mass shootings. Suicides are the majority of the nearly 40,000 gun deaths in the US in 2017. But urban violence is the second biggest category, making up a majority of the 14,000 gun homicides that same year”
More than 1,600 people died in Pennsylvania from gunshot wounds in 2017, “and where ever you are reading this column in any urban area, I´m pretty sure the same impact from gun violence is felt in your community,” the analyst said.
Interesting numbers
To support his point, the writer used data recorded by Giffords Law Center. “Nowhere is the gun violence crisis more evident than in our underserved urban communities, where homicide rates often reach 10 times the national average.”
Young Black men are especially vulnerable “the chance of a Black American family losing a son to a bullet is 62% greater than losing him to a car accident. In fact, Black men make up just 6% of the US population, but account for 51% of all homicide victims.”
The Giffords Law Center works at the local, state and national levels to provide legal assistance, free of charge, to legislators, attorneys, legal professionals, law enforcement officers and citizens seeking to make their communities safer from gun violence.
Translated by: José Espinoza
Noticias Newswire
