Fury at new mass shootings. Disinterest in the daily killings.

Summary: Another week, two more mass shootings in America. It is clickbait heaven for journalists and politicians, both working to make Americans ignorant. Meanwhile, the daily carnage in our cities continues – lost amidst the excitement of ClownWorld. Let’s put our feet on the ground and coolly examine the numbers.

Liberal Americans go berserk at each mass shooting incident. While horrific, they are not increasing in frequency. When not obsessing about mass shootings, they scream about the shootings by police officers (often of criminals, but sometimes unjustified). Both of these represent a dot in the river of blood spilled in America each year, flowing through our cites amidst the indifference of activists on the Left and Right.

• In 2017 there were ~433 mass shooting deaths (estimates vary), 17,284 homicides, and 38,773 deaths from guns.

Be proud, America! We have five cities in the world’s top 50!

A list of the top fifty cities with the highest homicide rate per 100,000 residents. We are the only developed nation on the list. There are 10 nations, all but South Africa are in the western hemisphere.

66 – # 13 – St. Louis.
55 – # 21 – Baltimore.
49 – # 32 – San Juan,  Puerto Rico.
40 – # 41 – New Orleans.
40 – # 42 – Detroit.

London is having a crime wave. How does its homicide rate compare with our cities?

Celebrate that the homicide rate is down but still very high

The homicide rate has declined from its insanely high levels down to levels far above those of our peers. Graphs from 538 tell the tale. To put this in perspective, America’s homicide rate of 5.3 per hundred thousand was #88 in the world. The next highest among our peers was Canada at 1.8 (#151) – data here. Let’s not party too hard about this.

Why don’t we care about the daily carnage?

Perhaps we don’t care because mass shooters kill “regular people” while the daily carnage mostly afflicts denizens of our inner cities. See “Black Homicide Victimization in the United States” by the Violence Policy Center – “An Analysis of 2016 Homicide Data” (press release here).

“The devastation homicide inflicts on black teens and adults is a national crisis, yet it is all too often ignored outside of affected communities. For the year 2016, blacks represented 13% of the nation’s population, yet accounted for 51% of all homicide victims.

• Of the 7,756 black homicide victims, 6,748 (87%) were male, 1,003 (13%) were female ….
• The homicide rate for black male victims was 37.12 per 100,000. ….For white male homicide victims it was 4.39 per 100,000.
• The homicide rate for female black victims was 5.07 per 100,000. …For white female homicide victims it was 1.55 per 100,000.

Other details about Black homicide victims.

• “7% were less than 18 years old and 2%  were 65 years of age or older. The average age was 31 years old.
• “For homicides in which the weapon used could be identified, 87% were shot and killed with guns. Of these, 66% were killed with handguns. In comparison, 67% of white victims and 78% of victims of all races were killed with guns.
• “For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 75% of black victims were killed by someone they knew.
• “For homicides in which the circumstances could be identified, 71% were not related to the commission of any other felony. Of these, 48% involved arguments between the victim and the offender, and 17% (523 homicides) were reported to be gang-related.”

Black communities attack the source of their problems

Across the nation, Black communities attack the police for too-severe responses to their astronomic crime rates, and demand higher quality recruits for these jobs with low pay and hostile working conditions. Here is a community mobilizing! This is logic …in ClownWorld.

But we need guns for self-defense!

Just like most previous studies, a report by the Violence Policy Center concludes that guns are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes.

“In 2016, across the nation there were only 274 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program as detailed in its Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). That same year, there were 10,341 criminal gun homicides tallied in the SHR. In 2016, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 37 criminal homicides. And this ratio, of course, does not take into account the tens of thousands of lives ended in gun suicides or unintentional shootings that year.”

Let’s try those effective solutions used by other nations

There have been many studies about the effectiveness of gun regulations, looking at the experience of many nations. For example, Australia implemented stricter gun regulations after mass shootings in 1996 and 2002. A vast body of studies has examined their effects, finding that the new regulations have no effect. Or they have big effects. It depends on the analyst. It is more evidence that modern science is broken, but tells us little else.

The important thing is that we continue to experiment with large-scale social engineering on this problem, using our people as lab rats. The confidence of ideologues is the same as knowledge …in ClownWorld!

Conclusions

American politics has become a mob of people demanding solutions to problems that we do not understand and politicians promising to implement imaginary fast certain easy fixes. This is politics for a nation of gullible peons.

We must know the limits of our knowledge, and implement research and experiments to provide a basis for serious social policy. We can address our problems – if we are willing to pay the price in money and work.

For More information.

Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

Here are the findings of an exhaustive study of mass shooters. They also give recommendations, which appear to me to be either extremely difficult to do or probably ineffective.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about gun violence and regulation, and especially these …

1. The Founders talk to us about guns for a well-regulated militia.
2. But Hitler confiscated guns, leaving Germans helpless!
3. Let’s look at the Second Amendment, cutting through the myths and spin.
4. Myth-busting about gun use in the Wild West.
5. Second amendment scholarship (using money to reshape America).
6. Do guns make us more safe, or less? Let’s look at the research.
7. The number of children killed by guns in America makes us exceptional, not better.
8. Cut thru the lies and myths to understand guns in America.
9. Why Americans love guns and don’t care about the blood.
10. Debunking the hysteria about mass shootings.
11. Is an armed society a safe society? – Spoiler: no.

Interesting books about guns

See reviews of these books: Don’t just mourn. Remember what we know about guns.

• Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011) by Adam Winkler (a professor of constitutional law at UCLA). See David Cole’s book review at the NY Review of Books (gated).
• Guns across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights by Robert J. Spitzer (2015).
• Do Guns Make Us Free?: Democracy and the Armed Society by Firmin DeBrabander (2015).
• The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture by Pamela Haag (2016).

For something different, see Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment by Craig Whitney (2012).