Carry Weapon Stereotypes

In Richard B. Felsons’ Another cost of being a young black male: Race, weaponry, and lethal outcomes in assaults, the reader is meant to understand the fact that most of the time violent crime is intraracial. A main talking point during the first week of lecture is the idea that crime is an expression of fear. Felson can be seen pointing to this idea in the beginning of the article when he states that “evidence suggests that blacks are generally more likely to carry guns and knives than whites” (Felson, Painter-Davis 2012). I feel as though this suggestion relates to blacks in inner cities more than anywhere because those locations prove to be hot spots for crime which would make all the more sense to why blacks would feel the need to carry weapons on them more often than whites. This proves to be a continuous circle of problems for blacks in these communities because when most of them feel the need to carry …show more content…
The article has a whole section of the article based on stereotyping which just shows the reader how important this issue truly is in the field in general. “Offenders may feel threatened when the victim is a young black male, but not when the victim is a black female or an older black. A number of scholars have suggested that people are most likely to stereotype young black males as dangerous” (Anderson, 1990, Dunier, 1992, Gibbs, 1988, Lemelle, 1994 and Lyman, 1994). This, to me, is a major issue that is brought up quite a bit when discussing issues within the criminal justice in general as well as just with the way people live their lives. This is the most “popular” stereotype that I personally have seen in my life because I mostly have white friends and things that I have heard and seen push towards this major stereotype. Whether my friends realize it or not they were racially stereotyping our black classmates sometimes without even thinking about