While they grab attention, justifiably, mass shootings remain outliers. Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. The tyranny of everyday shootings — the 12,000 homicides a year that happen so regularly that some people don’t even call 911 anymore — follow patterns completely divorced from the weapons used. These shootings have much more to do with the realities of life for the poor, the drug-addicted, the mentally ill and the criminal.

Gun violence is most acute among young black men. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency says the homicide rate per 100,000 of white males between 15 and 19 years old is 1.8. For Hispanic males, it’s 14.6.

For African American males, it’s a staggering 50.6 per 100,000.

Only recently, Richmond, Calif., had among America’s highest per capita rates of gun violence. In 2009, there were 47 homicides among 100,000 residents. Officials there theorized that a few bad actors caused most of the problem. As it turned out, 70 percent of their gun violence in 2008 was caused by fewer than 1 percent of the city’s residents. This isn’t unique: in Cincinnati, less than 1 percent of the city’s population was responsible for 74 percent of homicides in 2007.

Richmond developed an innovative, controversial program: They identified the 50 people most likely to shoot someone and engaged with them, even paying them to participate.

The city provided career help, training, resume writing and health care. It asked people what they feared and helped them create plans to mitigate those fears.

Critics called it “paying gang members not to shoot people.” It was more than that. And it worked.

From 2007 to 2012, the city experienced a 61 percent reduction in homicides. It turned out that the money was nowhere near as important as people had thought — people still show up to the meetings even though no one is paying them anymore. The interventions steered potential killers onto a better path.

It is legal to carry a firearm openly in Texas, and Yafeuh Balogun often keeps a 12-gauge Mossberg 500 slung over his shoulder. He patrols his Dallas neighborhood and promotes the benefits of legal gun ownership to people who, like himself, are black.

But the issues of race, policing and gun rights have turned into a volatile mix after two officer-involved shootings of black men thought to have guns in recent days and the killing and wounding of officers by snipers during a protest Thursday night.
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The shooting of Philando Castile in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights comes at a time when more blacks appear to view gun ownership as way to shield them from violence. Black communities suffer from gun violence at much higher rates than white ones, but 54 percent of black people said guns did more to protect than endanger personal safety, according to a 2014 Pew Research survey. That is up from 29 percent two years earlier.

It's hard to read Comey's statement as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She did send and receive classified emails. The setup did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team did delete emails as personal that contained professional information.

Those are facts, facts delivered by the Justice Department of a Democratic administration. And those facts run absolutely counter to the narrative put forth by the Clinton operation: that this whole thing was a Republican witch-hunt pushed by a bored and adversarial media.
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For a candidate already badly struggling on questions of whether she is honest and trustworthy enough to hold the office to which she aspires, Comey's comments are devastating. Watching them, I could close my eyes and imagine them spliced into a bevy of 30-second ads — all of which end with the FBI director rebuking Clinton as "extremely careless."