Dreher on Guns and Race

I cited a column by Rod Dreher in CNN column about guns and race.

Rod explains that I misunderstood his point:

Frum seems to have read my post as saying that somehow we shouldn’t care if young black thugs are killing young black thugs. That’s not what my column says at all. I didn’t address gun control in this blog post or its predecessor, but rather crime, demographics, and geography. The “thugs killing thugs” point was to say that if you are a) not black, b) not male, c) not young, d) not a resident of a poor neighborhood, and e) not involved in crime, you stand an excellent chance of not being one of Baton Rouge’s murder victims. You can be foursquare in favor of gun control, or resolutely against gun control, and still agree (or disagree) with the points made in my blogs.

I am troubled that readers of David’s column might think that I said, in effect, “Oh, it’s just black criminals shooting black criminals, who cares.” That’s not it at all. Rather, I was trying to say that to focus only on the racial demographics of homicide in Baton Rouge is to miss some important context that help you evaluate whether or not you are safe in certain parts of the city, e.g., the shopping mall in south Baton Rouge. Which was the genesis of the discussion on those threads.