What Has André Carson Done On Youth Violence?

Indianapolis Has a Youth Violence Crisis. The Response Has Been a Tax Credit for Gun Safes.

Monday, April 20

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Indianapolis, IN — Indianapolis has a youth violence problem.

 

It’s not subtle. It’s not a statistic to be managed from Washington. It’s funerals. It’s mothers burying children. It’s young people who grow up knowing the sound of gunshots the way other kids know the sound of lawnmowers. It’s a crisis that has persisted, deepened, and demanded a response for years.

 

André Carson has represented this city for 18 years.

 

His primary legislative response to Indianapolis's youth violence crisis in the current Congress was the introduction of the Gun Safety Incentive Act, a bill that would create a tax credit for the purchase of gun safes. It was introduced in a Republican-controlled Congress where it had no path forward. It didn’t pass. It wasn’t designed to pass. It was designed to exist.

 

On the appropriations side, Carson secured $963,000 for the Indy Peace Fellowship and $250,000 for the Bloom Project through community project funding. These are real organizations doing real work and that funding matters to them. It doesn’t constitute a strategy.

 

A strategy would look different. It would look like fighting for federal Community Violence Intervention funding at a scale that matches the size of the problem. It’d look like pushing the Department of Justice to treat Indianapolis as a priority city for its violence reduction programs. It’d look like using the Intelligence Committee seat—which exists to understand threats to American safety—to surface the connection between disinvestment, poverty, and community violence. It’d look like authoring legislation that addresses the root conditions that make violence possible in the first place.

 

What Indianapolis has received instead is a tax credit nobody can use in a Congress that would never pass it and less than $1.25 million in earmarks for organizations doing the work that federal policy should be supporting at scale.

 

Youth violence isn’t a problem that yields to half-measures. It requires the full force of a congressional office—the relationships, the platform, the legislative tools, and the willingness to make this city's children a personal priority rather than a line item in an appropriations request.

 

For 18 years, Indianapolis's children have deserved that fight. They haven’t gotten it.

 

"Indianapolis families are burying children," Hornedo said. "The response from our congressman after 18 years is a gun safe tax credit that never passed and less than a million and a half dollars in earmarks. That’s neither a strategy nor a fight. Indianapolis's children deserve a congressman who treats their safety as the emergency it is and uses every tool available to address it at the scale the crisis demands."

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This is part of the Hornedo campaign's daily accountability series, What Has André Carson Done?, running through May 1st. Learn more at georgehornedo.com.

 

Indianapolis deserves more than a vote in Washington. It deserves a congressman who uses the full platform of the office to fight for federal resources, to force the conversation at every level of government, and to show up for this community before the cameras arrive. That's the standard. That's what's been missing.

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RECORD CHECK: The Center for Effective Lawmaking ranks Congressman Carson 197th out of 220 House Democrats in legislative effectiveness. Of his claimed 22 bills signed into law, 2 are standalone enacted bills—the Ariel Rios Federal Building naming and the Kennedy-King National Commemorative Site Act. 

 

73% of Congressman Carson's campaign funding comes from PACs, much of it from corporate PACs including AES Indiana, BlackRock, and defense contractors. Only 7% comes from small-dollar donors.

 

When Julia Carson held this seat, Indianapolis was a competitive Democratic stronghold that helped power statewide wins. Under André Carson, the 7th Congressional District has become the worst in Indiana for voter turnout and Democrats haven't won statewide since 2012.