Gun laws aren't helping many Black and brown communities that deal with gun violence every day

• Baltimore has one of the highest violent crime rates in America, with over 300 murders each year.
• Gun violence in the city disproportionately affects Black and brown communities.

Gun deaths across the US have spiked in recent years. And national discussions on how to address the issue often pit those who call for more gun control against those who believe in their right to ownership.

But the communities that are actually most impacted by day-to-day gun violence have largely been left out of the conversation.

In Baltimore, at least 300 people have been murdered each year for the past five years. That's almost one victim every day since 2015. And shooting is by far the most frequent cause of death.

I visited some local groups in the city to see how they're trying to tackle these problems on their own.

Jamal West is part of an anti-violence group called Roca that works closely with high-risk young men in Baltimore. Born and raised in the city, he is all too familiar with what's happening in these streets.

"We have guys in our program who don't go to work unless they have a gun on them," Jamal told me. "They're scared somebody might see them at 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning from a rival gang."

Baltimore has one of the highest violent crime rates in America.

Over a fifth of its residents - many of whom are people of color - live in poverty.

Investment in the city has been historically uneven, concentrated in neighborhoods that are less Black, which has perpetuated racial and economic divisions.

These issues all contribute to a seemingly endless cycle of gun violence.

A nonprofit called the Community Justice Action Fund connects policymakers across the country with organizations like Roca that deal with gun violence on the ground.

"We really want to make sure that solutions to end gun violence come from the community and are not prescribed by some outside group that's making judgment calls on people," said Gregory Jackson, executive director of the nonprofit.

He says gun control legislation misses the mark.

Baltimore's assault weapons ban and background checks on handgun sales haven't stopped people from getting a hold of firearms illegally, nor have they deterred violent crime.

"In the communities that we're working in and we're advocating for, unfortunately a lot of them are already saturated with guns," Jackson said. "And so frankly, when we look at addressing gun violence in Black and brown communities, we know that you can't just focus on the hardware. We have to also focus on the people, and how do we make sure that they are in better living conditions."

Jackson himself nearly died from a gunshot wound in 2013. While recovering in the hospital, he was struck by the country's rhetoric around news of the Sandy Hook school shooting that had just broken.

"When Newtown happened, we saw the lives and the future and the potential [of those children]," he said. But when a youth in my neighborhood was shot, he said, "you didn't see his future and what he could do and where he could go."

"And I think that's a huge problem. We have to figure out, how do we humanize these lives that are being lost at all levels and prioritize them all accordingly?"

Mass shootings have caused less than 1% of all gun deaths over the past couple of decades.

But every time one happens, there's a 15% increase in the number of state-level firearm bills introduced the following year - an effect that's even more pronounced when there's heightened media coverage.

These reactions, Jackson says, do little to solve gun violence in Black and brown communities.

"They're different battles a lot of times," he said. "And unfortunately, elected officials and policymakers sometimes clump them all together and don't see the intricacies of this challenge."

Four months after I met him, Dante Barksdale was shot and killed. He had spent more than a decade trying to keep Baltimore's streets safe.

In October 2021, the city's mayor, Brandon M. Scott, set aside $50 million from federal coronavirus recovery money to help fund community violence intervention programs like Dante's.

The mayor himself said he saw his first shooting happen in his childhood neighborhood of northwest Baltimore before the age of 10.

"We're literally out here dying at historic levels for decades," Gregory Jackson of the Community Justice Action Fund said. "If it was any other situation where we were losing this many humans or Americans a year, the world would be upside down until we figured out how to fix it."

"But unfortunately, because it's majority Black and brown lives, this is something that has been swept under the rug for too long."

Camera credits: Armando Gallardo and Joshua Thomas