Juan Williams: How the GOP stokes white fear of Black gun violence

The GOP, an 83 percent white party, has found the villain behind its own failure to seriously grapple with gun violence. 

The bad guys are Blacks and Latinos. 

Say what? Let’s listen. 

It was “two black racists [who] killed eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge” in 2016, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), said at a Senate hearing last week. 

Here’s Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), also trying to dilute ties between gun violence and white supremacists, identifying a New York gunman who shot at people in a subway as a “Black supremacist.” 

Here’s Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), at the same hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He identified an Asian woman and a Black man as the villains who threw “a Molotov cocktail into a police vehicle during the antifa riots.” 

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank picked up on those senators’ comments in a column last week. And they’re part of a larger pattern. 

From Arizona, here is GOP Senate candidate, Blake Masters. He said the real gun problem is coming from “people in Chicago, in St. Louis, shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly.” 

The core logic from these white, male, right-wing conservatives falls apart if the listener knows that mass shootings in the U.S. are overwhelmingly committed by white gunmen. 

More than half of the mass shootings committed in the U.S. since 1982 have been by whites, 53 percent. The perpetrator was Black or Latino in 25 percent of the cases, according to a report by Statista published last week.  

The white senators’ flawed thinking ignores the reality it was right-wing attacks, often rooted in white supremacy, that led to “28 of 30 political violence fatalities” in 2021, as Milbank noted based on data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said at the Senate hearing that FBI statistics show “of the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists it was investigating in 2020…87 percent were white supremacists.” 

Klobuchar added, “White supremacist violence is a nationwide problem.” 

I have been criticized by liberals for saying the biggest statistical threat to my life is a gun in the hand of another Black person. 

Now the surge in gun violence by white men requires the same honest debate about race and guns. 

Part of that honesty comes in acknowledging that the outline of the modest bipartisan deal on guns revealed on Sunday does not seriously tackle America’s gun epidemic.

More broadly, listening to Republicans oppose any limits to gun ownership is to hear a racial argument on a loop. 

They posture as martyrs daring to point out the epidemic of gunfire in big city minority neighborhoods to justify their opposition to oversight of the sale of guns. 

Playing to fears of Black crime among whites is a sure bet to get attention for Republicans.  

It got votes for former President Trump.  

While speaking to overwhelmingly white audiences in 2016, Trump stirred up racial animus by saying “honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities.” Then he famously asked Black voters to vote for him by saying, “What the hell do you have to lose?” 

Despite more than 250 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, Senate Republicans are imitating Trump in dealing with gun violence. 

Having created a scary picture of life in Black and Brown America they promise that no one in their white base should have to go through background checks, age requirements, mental health reviews or limits on purchasing assault weapons and massive amounts of ammunition. 

Implicit to their argument is that white Americans who want a gun should not be inconvenienced by the shocking gun violence now in our schools, grocery stores and churches. 

Despite the crass politics, polls show most Americans, including most white Americans and most gun owners, favor background checks and limits on the sale of assault weapons. 

Last week, polling showed “56 percent of gun owners say it is more important to curb gun violence than protect gun rights,” according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. 

Overall, the poll found that 59 percent of all Americans believe controlling gun violence is more important than protecting gun rights. Ninety-two percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents are in this category.  

But 35 percent of all Americans — including 70 percent of Republicans — think protecting gun rights should be the primary concern.   

What goes unsaid in that poll is that 83 percent of Republicans are white, according to Gallup. The GOP also wins the backing of 57 percent of non-college-educated whites and 60 percent of rural southerners, according to a 2020 Pew Report. 

It’s also worth noting that “three quarters of Black Americans say the Republican Party is racist,” according to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted in April and May. 

A Black man who lost his 86-year-old mother to a white gunman told the Senate panel last week, “My mother’s life mattered.” He told the senators that their “actions here today will tell us how much it matters to you.” 

The Republicans in the Senate are not talking to him. They are talking up white fear.  

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.