As long as no one factors in race, we can continue study the question without reaching an answer, thus keeping academics employed.
I think the issue is culture more so than race.
One culture in the U.S. not only tolerates a high level of criminality, a substantial subset of it even venerates it. For things to change, this must end.
If there was a central message to be drawn from the survey, it was that gun violence is tightly concentrated in the poorest urban neighborhoods, its victims mostly minorities, who receive little attention from politicians and the news media.
And as I posted above, West Viginia and Mississippi are both poor states. Some folks in the hollows of West Viginia experience depravations far worse than those in North Philly. Yet the West Viginia murder rate is much lower than Mississippi. Poverty is not the cause. In the violence-prone sections of inner-cities, it is a symptom of the same thug culture that feeds the violence.
So this is yet another liberal circle-jerk that refuses to face the hard facts and is therefore doomed to accomplish utterly nothing towards solving the underlying problems.
Have no fear, the New York Times wears blinders - they can't see the elephant in the room.