Firearms, crime, politics and race

 

The Spectator has stated the bald facts of the matter in a way that's sure to infuriate the progressive left... but facts are facts.

Crime is a people problem. If you understand nothing else about crime, you must understand this — crime is committed by people. It is not committed by inanimate objects, and while data on criminal activity can be charted as a trend over time, trends don’t commit crimes, people do. There is a word for people who commit crimes; we call these people “criminals” and, if anyone is interested in investigating trends, one trend is fairly consistent — most violent criminals are repeat offenders, and will not stop this behavioral pattern unless they are locked up in prison.

Keep all these facts in mind the next time you hear Democrats or the news media (but I repeat myself) discussing “gun violence” as an issue. Democrats do not want to discuss crime as a people problem, but rather as a gun problem, because (a) most gun owners are Republicans and (b) most criminals are Democrats. Or, that is to say, the violent crime problem in America is largely concentrated in urban areas where Democrats get the majority of the vote.

Research by John R. Lott Jr. highlights just how geographically concentrated the murder problem is in the United States. Of the more than 3,000 counties in the country, 52 percent had zero murders in 2020, while the 31 counties with the highest murder rates (the worst 1 percent) had 42 percent of the nation’s murders. Expand the focus to the worst 2 percent (62 counties), and these accounted for more than half (56 percent) of U.S. murders in 2020. Lott concluded: “Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas …”

Yes, but what about “gun violence”? What about the inflammatory rhetoric of Democrats demonizing the National Rifle Association (NRA) as somehow to blame for America’s crime problem? Among other things, Lott took into account rates of firearm ownership, and found an inverse relationship between the prevalence of murder and rates of gun ownership: “According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, the household gun ownership rate in rural areas was 79% higher than in urban areas. Suburban households are 37.9% more likely to own guns than urban households. Despite lower gun ownership, urban areas experience much higher murder rates.”

So much for the correlation between gun ownership and crime. What do we know about the correlation between politics and crime? The five U.S. cities with the highest per capita murder rates are St. Louis (69.4 per 100,000 population), Baltimore (51.1), New Orleans (40.6), Detroit (39.7), and Cleveland (33.7). In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden got 82 percent of the vote in St. Louis, 87 percent in Baltimore, 83 percent in New Orleans, 94 percent in Detroit and 80 percent in Cleveland. In other words, the most dangerous cities in America are all Democratic Party strongholds.

These facts are not difficult to discover, if anyone is willing to do a few Google searches, but you would probably have no idea about any of this if your source for news was ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Associated Press. The so-called “mainstream media” seem to operate as a cartel, doing everything in their power to prevent the public from learning the truth about crime in America.

. . .

According to the FBI, in 2021 there were about 23,000 homicides in the country and, based on data from 2019, about 54 percent of U.S. murder victims are black people, most of whom are killed by other black people. It is impossible to discuss violent crime in America without acknowledging that at least half of it involves black people, both as victims and perpetrators, despite the fact that blacks are only 14 percent of the U.S. population. The national media clearly doesn’t want to discuss this — for reasons that are fundamentally political — and so the picture of crime in America conveyed by the media is distorted beyond recognition. This political distortion produces a yawning chasm between the reality of crime and its portrayal in the news media.

There's more at the link, and it's worth reading.

A graphic illustration of the reality of race and violence in America, in comparison to statistics from other countries, was provided recently in a Gab post.  Click the image for a larger view.

I looked up the figures to confirm what I was seeing - one's never sure about a social media post until one verifies it - and they match up.  The racial disparity in firearm homicide rates in the USA is profound.

The next time someone argues that your private ownership of firearms, and your willingness to use them to defend yourself and your loved ones against criminals, is contributing to the "gun violence" problem, show them those numbers, and point out the reality of the problem.  It's not a gun problem.  It's a people problem, and more specifically, a problem with people in particular population groups.  That may not be politically correct, but it's the truth.

Peter