On Friday, we talked about comparing the US murder rate to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
Monday, the subject was what’d happen if we excluded America’s top forty highest-crime cities from the average.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, we talked about what’d happen if we left the Old South, with its centuries of relatively violent Scots-Irish heritage, out of the nation’s murder rate.<\/p>\n
In every case, the results were big.<\/p>\n
Now, let’s go bigger.<\/p>\n
The Math<\/strong>: \u00a0Here’s what it comes down to.<\/p>\n If you take the US’s 319 million people and 12,000-odd homicides (about 8,000 of which involve guns), and subtract:<\/p>\n And what does that leave?<\/p>\n Peace And Tranquility<\/strong>: \u00a0Incredibly, of the roughly 12,000 murders in the US in 2014, around 8,700 took place in either the Top Fifty crime cities, or the former slave states.<\/p>\n That’s 71% of the homicides for the entire US.<\/p>\n In other words, just a little over a quarter of all murders in the US happen outside the Old South and the fifty cities \u00a0and the slightly over a third of the population, with the highest murder rates.<\/p>\n The homicide rate for rest of the\u00a0US – including many of its largest\u00a0cities, and all of its urban and suburban areas outside Dixie – \u00a0falls to…1.8 per 100,000. \u00a0 That’s the same as Israel – and it’s tied for #163 in the world. \u00a0It’s about 20% lower than Norway’s<\/em> murder rate. \u00a0 It’s not a lot higher, statistically, than Belgium, Canada, or Finland.<\/p>\n It’s about the same as North Dakota’s was,\u00a0before\u00a0<\/em>the oil boom. Or Vermont today.<\/p>\n Or, as a matter of fact, almost identical to that of…<\/p>\n …wait for it…<\/p>\n …no,\u00a0wait\u00a0<\/em>for it…<\/p>\n Peaceful, placid, passive-aggressive Minnesota. \u00a0North Minneapolis included.<\/p>\n And firearm crimes are more like 1.1-1.2\/100,000. \u00a0Not “vanishingly low”, but pretty low. \u00a0 About the same a Croatia, Macedonia, or Israel.<\/p>\n So…What?<\/strong>: \u00a0One of the Second Amendment movement’s oldest, most successful aphorisms is “guns don’t kill people; people do”.<\/p>\n And people do evil, or stupid, things for as many reasons as there are people.<\/p>\n But there are some overarching patterns that drive violence in the US; a violence-prone urban culture, with its gangs and black-marketeering and deeply dysfunctional justice system, and a deep south with a tolerance for petty and major violence that far exceeds the rest of the country.<\/p>\n And with those controlled for, the level of violence in the US, by world standards, is to say the least, low.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Where the Numbers Came From<\/strong>; \u00a0 OK, this is simple math – but pay attention. I don’t wanna repeat myself.<\/p>\n On Friday, we talked about comparing the US murder rate to the rest of the world. Monday, the subject was what’d happen if we excluded America’s top forty highest-crime cities from the average. Yesterday, we talked about what’d happen if we left the Old South, with its centuries of relatively violent Scots-Irish heritage, out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,22],"tags":[360],"class_list":["post-56598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-victim-disarmament","tag-gun-homicide-apples-and-apples"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56598"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56628,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56598\/revisions\/56628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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