The term “gun violence” is one that gets thrown around a lot, and while I don’t have the same issue with it that many others do, I am annoyed that this is treated like the great scourge. Especially when there’s still plenty of other kinds of violent crime which is being ignored.

It’s one of the reasons I think we really should try to address violence at the source, undermining the things that lead some people down a pathway toward becoming violent criminals.

The way I figure it, if you do that, then you take care of all forms of violent crime and not just “gun violence.”

So when I saw a piece about a Democratic congressman from Maryland talking about just such a thing, I got interested.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., on Friday called for school improvements and other actions to address the root causes of gun violence that disproportionately impacts Black communities.

The first-term congressman, in collaboration with the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and gun violence prevention groups, hosted the Prince George’s County Gun Violence Survivors Week Action Summit in Washington, D.C.

The three-hour summit was organized to highlight “major structural challenges that create these types of disparities that lead to violence in Black communities,” Ivey told theGrio.

“Pockets of poverty, struggling schools, lack of job opportunities” are some of the reasons for gun violence,” Ivey said. “We need to have better and stronger school systems across the nation and we need to expand job opportunities.”

Well, that’s a refreshing change of pace.

I’m still sure Ivey and I might disagree on how to implement some of this, but at least this is a discussion we could have and possibly create actual solutions to violent crime as a whole.

But there’s also reason to be less trusting of Ivey than I’d like to be.

See, he’s still a fan of gun control.

In April 2023, Ivey introduced the Raise the Age Act, which aims to prevent teenagers from accessing assault weapons by raising the buying age to 21. While the bill has the support of House Democrats, it lacks backing from Republican lawmakers.

Of course, if he’s looked at the statistics as much as I’m sure he’d claim, he’d know that so-called assault weapons aren’t use all that often in so-called gun crimes.

Sure, some high profile incidents involve them, thus making it look like they’re the big issue, but all forms of rifles are used less often to kill than hands and feet.

Ivey wanting to undermine the formation of violent criminals is a very good thing. It’s something I’ve been harping on since I first started writing here.

Yet I’m curious when he decided to embrace this since he apparently hasn’t figured out that if you undermine the creation of violent criminals, you eliminate the pretext used to justify gun control in the first place. You put an end to the situations that are just to push for infringement on our right to keep and bear arms.

Is this a case of recognizing that his earlier effort may have been misguided or unnecessary, or is this a case of trying to pull an end-around?

I honestly don’t know and unless Ivey can explain it, I’m skeptical anyone on the pro-gun side in Washington will take his calls.