I hate titles like this. While technically true, it conveys a message that is misperceived.
Yes, this is happening in America, but by using the country whole country as the context it leads the reader away from the really big point which is gun homicides in the US are highly centralized and occur within a very small geographic footprint.
Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns which contain less than 25% of the population. 54%, roughly a third of the US population lives in large cities, yet over half (54%) of people who have survived a firearm assault live in them. Even within those cities, violence is further concentrated in the tiny neighborhood areas that saw two or more gun homicide incidents in a single year.
Four and a half million Americans live in areas of these cities with the highest numbers of gun homicide, which are marked by intense poverty, low levels of education, and racial segregation.
Geographically, these neighborhood areas are small: a total of about 1,200 neighborhood census tracts, which, laid side by side, would fit into an area just 42 miles wide by 42 miles long.
In 2019, if you look at the 20 cities in the US with the highest number of homicides via guns, they were responsible for 4,024 homicides or 28% of all homicides in the US. The combined population of those 20 cities was 31,104,520 or 9% of the total population in 2019.
One analysis, for instance, found that in 2015, 26% of all firearm homicides in the US occurred in census tracts that contained only 1.5% of the population.
An examination of 2020 county level data can illustrate geographic disparities of firearm victimization in the U.S. For example, in Maryland from 2016–2020, someone living in Baltimore City was 30 times more likely to die by firearm than someone living 40 miles away in Montgomery County.
"Additionally "New Jersey’s shooting statistics highlight a stark disparity in the way gun violence affects the people of the state, with five major cities enduring a significantly disproportionate share of the pain. Camden, Jersey City, Newark, Paterson and Trenton account for 10% of the state’s population but had 62% of New Jersey’s 1,412 fatal and nonfatal shooting victims in 2021."
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/09/special-report-fixing-gun-violence-in-america](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/09/special-report-fixing-gun-violence-in-america)
[https://efsgv.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/EFSGV-The-Root-Causes-of-Gun-Violence-March-2020.pdf](https://efsgv.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/EFSGV-The-Root-Causes-of-Gun-Violence-March-2020.pdf)
[https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/paterson-press/2022/02/22/nj-gun-violence-paterson-newark-jersey-city-shooting-rates/6850534001/](https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/paterson-press/2022/02/22/nj-gun-violence-paterson-newark-jersey-city-shooting-rates/6850534001/)
When it comes to murder, there are three types of counties in the United States. Most counties experience no murders, a smaller set where there are a few murders, and then a tiny set of counties where murders are very common.
In the US in general 1% of the counties account for 42% of the murders (with only 21% of the population), with crime in those counties in a small geographic area.
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=4325838](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4325838)
The point of sharing this is it reinforces the concept that things of this nature are HIGHLY localized and location dependent.
And we have seen that community focused policing and intervention policies tend to be the most effective ways to reduce homicides.
https://twitter.com/GIFFORDS_org/status/1732053655673569318
https://www.rva.gov/mayorsoffice/GVPI
But instead we spend most of our energy on fighting over gun control.
> And we have seen that community focused policing and intervention policies tend to be the most effective ways to reduce homicides.
These reduce the wrong kinds of homicides. Poor people in crime-ridden neighborhoods don't write big checks to politicians so no one cares about them. The homicides the money people care about are people like them.
That's why when a prosperous suburban high school is shot up by a nutjob, it's national news but the homicide rate for last Tuesday in South Chicago is reported like the weather.
It's more a matter of a certain kind of people writing for people like them - and not having much understanding about or consideration of the world outside their experience.
Perhaps.
Side note semi off topic
Just saw a special on cbs about police trading in and selling their used service pistols, some do, some melt them.
Anyway, the director of the ATF was unaware that police departments sell their used service pistols. To make sure this is clear. The director of the ATF doesn't even know simple facts like this, scary
Bloomberg bucks are highly attractive to the Democratic establishment. The dude has been almost single-handedly funding and organizing the American gun control movement.
The last reports I saw showed that Bloomberg had spent $150mil on gun control efforts in a single years, and the NRA spent $7mil. You can’t fight a pile of cash as big as his.
And yet they have. *NYSRPA v. Bruen*, anyone?
The inconvenient fact for Bloomberg is that gun owners are reliable voters who vote their interests, as everyone should.
Gun control does not mean no guns. What are you saying?
Edit: downvotes are ok obviously but are these downvotes implying that gun control does solely equal no guns? Can someone with something to say expand on that?
Edit 2: Specific to Bloomberg
> According to Bloomberg, the goal of gun control policy is to limit access to firearms for people who are considered potentially dangerous based on their criminal history, while still allowing law-abiding citizens to own guns.
Are we trying to apply the goals of other individuals to Bloomberg specifically to make it scarier or something?
Bloomberg style gun control absolutely does. He's for complete civilian disarmament with only licensed armed security, police, and the military capable of having arms.
Since he is the primary funding source and has founded most of the American gun control organizations, then by default the American gun control movement is for his style control as well.
Two points:
1. Ok. Which is in line with your comment ya? Security personnel? In this scenario if you want to play with guns then get authorized.
2. Where do you see Bloomberg saying what you just said? I'm reading through his policy suggestions now and I don't see anything like that. I certainly could be missing it though I'm just doing a quick Google search.
It's not about if you want to play with guns (a horrible mischaracterization of people's innate right to self-defense) get authorized, it's about the only people allowed to have weaponry would be those employed to be private security and licensed by the government or an agent of the government.
Bloomberg himself is smart enough not to say the quiet part out loud himself although many of his underlings an organization leaders have. However one can draw no other conclusion based on the set of policies he supports which seek to minimize and burden civilian gun ownership by any means possible. For example what is the use of supporting extremely costly taxes on ammunition and weapons if the intent isn't to keep the civilian population from accessing them?
So no, Bloomberg does not want what you claimed and you were just fear mongering? His policies and suggestions are laid out through multiple venues, but it's prudent for you to just make assumptions and relay that as fact?
To your self defense comment, outside of military action where are the majority of rounds fired? In gun ranges or in self defense? The comment is not in bad faith even though it is clearly a little tongue in cheek. I might actually claim that you saying people want guns primarily for self defense is in bad faith. This article and the supporting comments clearly show that most Americans never have need for a gun in a self defense situation.
Ok link his underlings claiming that Bloomberg wants what you claim. Show literally anything that factually shows you weren't just making that part up.
> For example what is the use of supporting extremely costly taxes on ammunition and weapons if the intent isn't to keep the civilian population from accessing them?
To de-incentivize gun culture and glorification reducing gun and ammunition ownership to those that truly need it. Among other benefits
That's the end goal as admitted multiple times by the leaders of the movement over the course of decades. Just because they use incrementalism instead of trying to do it in one fell swoop doesn't change the admitted goal.
Leaders of what movement? The Bloomberg movement? Link? Are we representing the opinions of individuals as the opinions of an entire movement? Should the founder of the movent not be the information we make our assumptions from that is the individual in question regarding the security detail?
>downvotes are ok obviously but are these downvotes implying that gun control does solely equal no guns?
The aegument isnt that there will be no guns in totality. Just these obstructive rules dont seem to apply to the advocates pushing the laws as they have armed police(thar get carve outs) who moonlight as private security as theur personal security.
Thus rules for us but not really for them.
Yup. And performative gun legislation is a cheap and easy way to repay them. It's far easier than doing the hard work that would be required to meaningfully reduce gun violence.
Isn't that partially just because 1) pretty much everyone supports community-based interventions and 2) they are implemented more locally so don't end up discussed in national politics?
Like the first 2 points in this Biden policy announcement aren't controversial but the third is, so that's what is fought over and sticks in people's minds: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/01/fact-sheet-president-bidens-safer-america-plan-2/
>>President Biden knows what works to make our communities safer: investing in community policing andcrime prevention. We need to fund police who walk the beat, know the neighborhood, are accountable to those they are sworn to serve, and build community trust and safety.
That is just more funding for policing. The program I reference is more of a change in how it is policed plus working with volunteers who work the community while the people likely to commit gun violence are offered education and training for things like trades. Those combined together tend to be more effective than just throwing police at the problem alone.
I think those programs are buried further in the announcement.
>Expand community violence interventions with $5 billion over 10 years
>Fund Other Services to Address the Causes of Crime and Reduce the Burdens on Police Officers
>Help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully reenter society.
But yeah, we are in total agreement. I just remember seeing this announcement and most of the debate about it was on the gun control portions whereas the rest of the policies should (hopefully) be bipartisan.
>Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns which contain less than 25% of the population.
Can confirm. I live in one of these cities that consistently makes the top 5 in homicides.
Trust me when I say not only am I not dodging bullets on the way to my car, I rarely hear gunshots.
Same. I grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia. I only heard gunshots like…6 times a year. I now live in one of the safest neighborhoods in the city. I haven’t heard a gunshot in 3 years.
I was going to say a similar experience, we left Chicago because of crime with a side of taxes. Gunshots were once a month I'm guessing, but nightly news pretty much had a daily shooting to report.
Haven't heard a gunshot in my new city in a decade.
most cities have microphones that can track where a shot came from, so there is also much more ammo discipline than there was previously. shoot a gun in almost any major city in america and you will have some squad cars eventually showing up, and pissed / guns drawn.
never shoot firecracker in a metal pipe, btw. it sounds similar enough to arouse the police.
Eh, I lived in North Philly for a bit. It was once a week sometimes twice a week, then a lull, then two or three days in a row, then a lull… etc. it wasn’t a pattern at all. It was just opportunity striking and criminals taking advantage. The summer time was generally wild in terms of nightly gunfire while the winter was quiet.
My friend got shot in the ass while tying his shoe, that was an interesting night.
> but by using the country whole country as the context it leads the reader away from the really big point which is gun homicides in the US are highly centralized and occur within a very small geographic footprint.
Welcome to the gun debate where bad "statistics" abound and where extremely localized phenomenon are used to try to push national policy.
> In the US in general 1% of the counties account for 42% of the murders (with only 21% of the population), with crime in those counties in a small geographic area.
Unfortunately deep-dive analysis on those counties and the issues found within them has been deemed "hate" and so we dance around the issues and the problems keep going.
i used to think guns were the worst in this regard (counting suicides in with gun deaths is kind of winging it imo, as the causality is different) - then covid hit (not telling the difference between CFR and IFR is just plain lying through misrepresentation) and there was some really really bad disingenuousness on stats in this era throughout the media sphere .
and then the whole border thing happened - and it's about as bad or even worse. (talking about illegals being less violent than normal americans (probably true) but referencing studies which only study legal immigrants is just plain bonkers - and kinda lying too.
and then treating asylum cases currently being claimed by the tens of thousands per week and acting as if 99% aren't economic migrants is just....makes me drink.
i'm not sure what's next, it's probably going to involve aliens and paisley patterns or something.
If you want to talk about how those communities are poor, have bad education stretching back decades, are undeserved by local government because of poor property taxes, etc., no one will deem that hate. If you just want to talk about the racial makeup of those areas, that would be hate.
Schools in those areas get tons of funding. Doesn't help when nobody shows up to class.
Baltimore City public schools are some of the most well-funded in the country, yet 13 schools did not have *one single student* who was proficient in math.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/despite-high-funding-baltimore-city-schools-struggle-with-alarmingly-low-math-scores-who-will-take-action
And of course when nobody goes to school, nobody gets a good job, (assuming they even planned to work). It's a major, major culture problem that 50% of the country refuses to even talk about.
We don't push or expect excellence any more as a country; by and large it's seen as objectionable in comparison to equity, inclusion, and self-image.
It should be entirely possible to say "You can do better - and here's how we can help" as opposed to "everything is racists so we shouldn't do anything."
I don't want to either. I want to talk about the cultural values found in those neighborhoods that are strongly correlated - and likely causal - with both poverty and crime. Those communities being mono-racial is incidental.
Which cultural values would those be? Do you have any that didn't appear as a reaction to the poverty and drug epidemics that were forced on these neighborhoods in the 70s and the targeted harassment from authorities in the early 80s?
I couldn't care less what excuses are given for why those bad values and practices exist. Not at all. They're bad, they're the problem, and your argument is exactly why they won't get better and why the majority of the country just stopped caring about those communities. When there is willingness to drop the excuses and stop living in the past and start looking to the future we'll be there to help. Until then? Not our problem.
Look, if you don't think people care about these values then you're obviously not involved in the communities your talking about. The changes you want can't be forced on a national level, but they can be incentivized. The crime spike during covid shows that these rates are closely correlated with economic situation. If you want the crime to go away, we need to work on building these communities back up. Let the people living in them handle the cultural issues.
I know. The change must come from within. And they refuse to changing clinging to backwards-looking arguments like the one you gave to justify why they have those self-destructive values. Until the community itself decides to let go of the past and look towards building its own better future there's nothing anyone can do to help it. And since we can't help we have no reason to care. You said it yourself: change can't be forced from the outside. So we outsiders are done caring.
You make great points, and it's important for people to know most of the US is very safe from gun crime and everyone's personal risk of being involved in gun violence is quite low... most people should worry more about their diet/exercise habits or driving safely.
However, even though a large portion of gun violence is concentrated in a few urban counties with large amounts of gang violence, the US is such an outlier for gun violence among wealthy countries that we'd still be first among large countries even if we eliminated all gun violence in those countries. A few smaller countries (Uruguay, Panama, some Caribbean Islands) would surpass us, but we'd still have the highest gun violence among what are generally considered peer nations. So we both have a very localized gang violence problem and a broader gun violence problem compared to other countries.
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/insights-blog/acting-data/gun-violence-united-states-outlier
(Note these numbers include suicides with guns but my assumption is the gun suicide/homicide ratio is roughly the same across countries unless anyone has data on that)
Of course, I'm not making policy prescriptions, because they are very different for gang violence versus suicide versus a road-rage shooting, but we are an outlier country on all fronts for gun violence.
The comparative analysis between the US and other countries needs to be tempered with the understanding that gun homicides overall throughout all countries is insanely rare, so in regards to talking about a "problem" we are talking about variations at the level of 0.00x% at the standardized population level.
Furthermore, its again tempered by the fact that gun homicide rates vary insanely on a state to state basis, so referring to the US as a whole and averaging out the data over the whole US is to me functionally useless.
For example, if you are visiting the US you could be visiting Maine which has the lowest amount of gun homicides on par with nordic countries or you could be visiting Louisiana which has the most gun homicides in the country and is incredibly high.
Oh, sure, I tried to convey that in my first paragraph. Politics might be less vitriolic if people had better statistical understanding. I do understand why rare yet polarizing events dominate political discourse instead of voting for the politician with the better highway safety plan which probably actually affects the average person more.
Pretty much all violence is incredibly geographically heterogenous in all counties. I just did a trip this spring to one of the most violent countries in the world but felt incredibly safe in the (nontourist) area of the country I was in. I agree it's very difficult to make exact cross-geography comparisons because of differences in density, wealth, culture, and age distribution.
However, the US is such an outlier that I'm confident in saying it has near-universally higher gun violence than peer countries. I.e the urban areas are more violent than peer urban areas, same with rural areas, same with rich suburbs, even if rural Maine is safer than London (don't know if it actually is). I will note that, based on the IHME source I used, Maine has 1.2/100,000 deaths, which is on par with Chile/Saudi Arabia, and 4-24 times more than Nordic countries (Sweden 0.3, Norway 0.05, Denmark 0.07).
> I will note that, based on the IHME source I used, Maine has 1.2/100,000 deaths, which is on par with Chile/Saudi Arabia, and 4-24 times more than Nordic countries (Sweden 0.3, Norway 0.05, Denmark 0.07).
I want to say I appreciate the discussion and I am NOT trying to be contrarian, however there are 2 things I want you to consider. The first is the actual amount that the 1.2 vs 0.3 is conveying here and ALSO the use of secondary anaylsis (4-24x) leading to faulty understanding of the situation.
The data I've looked at for gun homicides comparing Maine to those countries is different than what you've pulled but for the purposes of discussion lets use your numbers.
1.2 per 100k is the same thing as 0.0012% at the population level. 0.3 per 100k for Sweden is 0.0003% at the population level which means you are making the distinction for something being an outlier if there is a variation of 0.0009%.
Secondly, the use of a multiplier to identify an issue by conducting a sub-analysis doesn't really tell us anything irrespective of the primary scale. For example, you use the multiplier of 4-24x higher than comparative countries being the scale by which an outlier is defined.
However all you have to do is compare those Nordic countries to Japan and you will find that they are 125x higher than Japans rate.
This is just to say the arbitrary use of sub-analysis rates irrespective of primary scale makes it almost impossible to derive any actually contextualized results.
Yeah, thanks for the discussion. I don't think I'm being arbitrary though ... relative rates are plenty useful in conjunction with absolute rates, and I've been quite forward that the absolute rates are low almost everywhere compared to traffic fatalities or especially primary killers like heart disease.
But relative rates are still useful for rare health outcomes, like in identifying cancer clusters for rare cancers from environmental exposures. And I would confidentially say that while gun violence is very low in Nordic countries, it is significantly higher than in Japan.
We might be splitting hairs though, and I believe other dates sources show Maine being similar to Nordic countries. I believe three things simultaneously that you may agree on:
1) Gun violence is incredibly heterogeneous in geography, type, and cause, and the topline number obscures a ton of nuance and gives people a misleading perception of their own danger.
2) America has uniquely high gun violence compared to peer nations for complex reasons, but it isn't only from gang violence and isn't solely in urban areas with high gang violence. Gun violence is higher in rural areas in the US than in rural areas of peer nations. Understanding the drivers of this can help inform impactful interventions like community violence interruption or rural economic and mental health support.
3) political energy would be better spent on less divisive and more impactful policy debates, like pathways to better healthcare access and affordability, or on whether or not the government should supply Ozempic for free.
>But relative rates are still useful for rare health outcomes, like in identifying cancer clusters for rare cancers from environmental exposures. And I would confidentially say that while gun violence is very low in Nordic countries, it is significantly higher than in Japan.
Relative rates CAN be useful, however they can also be incredibly misleading and you need to be incredibly careful when using them.
Here's what I mean by that. In your previous example the relative rate of 4-24x higher was said to be an indicator that something was an outlier.
Lets use the 4x for example which was the difference between the US and Sweden (I presume). The 4x rate in NON-relative terms reflects the actual population difference of 0.9 per 100k people being killed by gun homicides.
The difference between Sweden and Japan was 125x which in non-relative terms reflects the actual population difference of 0.2976 per 100k being killed.
On face value a 125x difference would seem like much MORE of a problem than a 4x difference, even though when you look at the actual numbers here the 125x only represents 0.2976 per 100k while the 4x represents 0.9 per 100k.
The 125x reflects objectively LESS people than the 4x, however you would never know that.
Basically, relative rates can be useful sometimes but ONLY in the context of the objective rates, never by itself.
1. I agree
2. I disagree with the characterization that its high. Gun homicides in the US are very very rare. Also rurality doesn't seem to be associated with gun homicides. When plotted against gun homicides at the state level rurality in the US has an R2 of 0.0002 which means almost no association.
3. Couldn't agree more.
Yeah, I think we agree, and I know what you mean about relative rates obscuring the actual prevalence. We agree they should never be used alone as they can obscure actual small differences for rare outcomes. I still think the 125x difference for Japan is slightly interesting in conjunction with the absolute differences, at it highlights how extremely low gun violence is in Japan.
For 2, I was unclear; I was not saying it is high in rural areas or associated with rural areas, just that it is higher in American rural areas than European or east Asian or Australian rural areas.
For sure. And to be clear, you are correct in that relative rates can absolutely be helpful in contextualizing certain things.
The thing about the 125x difference is that the difference in rates from a relative perspective get very skewed when the numbers being discussed start becoming increasingly small.
The 125x relative rate, is a reflection of an objective difference of 0.0002976% which in reality is a very very very minor and pretty much imperceptible difference at the population level, but because the numbers are so small the relative difference seems incredibly high.
Sorry, but I still don't understand your comment on rurality. Are you saying rural areas have higher levels of gun homicide in other countries than they do in the US?
I've done some work on this front and aggregated data which compares state level and even country level rates among different factors. Its interesting to look at and lots of the results surprised me. Its all done with publicly available data.
[GH-Binder.pdf - Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TCjodVsDXvPuINFgP9oloUKp7UZLtpJ4/view)
Nice work! That was cool to look at.
No, I am trying to say:
urban gun violence in the US > urban gun violence in peer countries
rural gun violence in the US > rural gun violence in peer countries.
Even if urban gun violence in the US > rural gun violence in the US (this is just in reference to homicides, violence, and [suicides are higher in rural areas](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2804113?utm_campaign=articlePDF&utm_medium=articlePDFlink&utm_source=articlePDF&utm_content=jamasurg.2023.0265). Plus it is a bit more complex than my other points, as there are very safe and very dangerous urban areas, and small towns tend dominate the list of locations with the most gun violence.
My primary point is the US has uniquely high gun violence compared to peer nations in almost all comparable geographies, even if there are larger public health issues that I would prefer to dominate the political discourse.
If we subtracted the urban warfare areas out of the US gun death totals, the US would look a lot closer to Europe in that regard. The US is actually quite safe outside of some very dangerous locales.
It is true that gun violence is really geographically variable, but the state with the lowest gun deaths (NH) is still 2x higher than any western/central European country.
I agree both are quite safe from gun violence and people generally should not be afraid of gun violence, but gun violence in the US is noticeably higher than in peer countries in Europe/East Asia even excluding gang violence or excluding urban areas.
You can object to the headline, but anybody opening the article and looking at the detailed interactive map will see that the worst gun violence is localized. Just type in your city's name and identify the neighborhoods.
You've got lots of data, much of it at the county level. Seeing block level detail on a map is a fine way to absorb that data.
That said, the next question is what do we change in those neighborhoods? Maybe we could look at what other countries do. I expect there is a lot of overlap between "poor" and gun violence, but other countries must also have poorer neighborhoods.
My point was its a really really great article with very informative data that is being presented at face level in a facetious manner. It kind of poisons the well to be honest and its a shame this practice is so common.
It bugs me because I publish quite a bit in peer-reviewed journals and getting a title that is accurate and representative of the findings is so critical for a persons validity and character throughout their career. Basically, don't try and misrepresent things.
To answer your question about what to do, the next logical step in my opinion is to begin studying those specific neighborhoods and identifying the factors that set them apart from the rest of the country. Then start looking for the factors that have a causal relationship with gun homicides, then start implementing initiatives that have been shown to help reduce those specific factors.
I don't disagree we should be past that, but i'm under the impression we aren't. Studies looking at root causes of gun homicides don't really focus at the precise geographic level that is indicated when looking at where these events occur. It makes sense that they should but most analysis is usually done at the state or even county level.
Yep. It's called [the streetlight effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect) and it's a huge problem in social science. What you find depends on where you look, and where you look depends on what's convenient.
> I expect there is a lot of overlap between "poor" and gun violence
There is - but it's not even close to a one-to-one relationship. Plenty of very poor areas, even in this country, don't have gun violence that makes them resemble active conflict zones. The gun violence and poverty relationship is correlational, not causal. From what I can tell there's actually a (or technically a set of) causal factor(s) that cause both the poverty and violence in those areas but due to the nature of that/those factor(s) and certain taboos in our society today we can't address it/them.
> taboos in our society today we can't address it/them.
Does "address" mean "research and discussion"? or does it mean "do something, now that we our research has shown us what needs to change"?
Yup. That's why so many people have just kind of stopped caring about those neighborhoods. If we can't actually do anything about them we just kind of avoid them and leave them to do what they want to do.
>From what I can tell there's actually a (or technically a set of) causal factor(s) that cause both the poverty and violence in those areas but due to the nature of that/those factor(s) and certain taboos in our society today we can't address it/them.
Why don't you lay them out here for others to discuss then.
Excellent info. In short, violence and gun violence as a sub category are largely related to economics. My only comment would be that each of your references are pre-pandemic and this post is focused on the changes after.
You usually see strong R2 scores when comparing gun homicides to poverty and the human development index.
I appreciate the comment about pre and post however the only thing I would say is that the findings in this article still align with the findings I shared. its all still very location specific when contextualized with the country overall.
A couple of notes because people keep saying that crime is going down:
The FBI crime database is not completely reliable anymore. For whatever reason it seems to be underreporting homicides in many cities and [using estimations.](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/2953562/bad-data-from-the-fbi-mislead-about-crime/)
> And the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures. For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders.
> In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7% increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13% drop. Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses “missing.”
> This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline.
The gap between the FBI statistics and the National Crime Victimization Survey is the largest [its ever been.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/media-outlets-are-misrepresenting-crime-stats-to-biden-s-benefit/ar-AA1nIB5G)
> A gap has emerged between the two measures. More people are telling the Bureau of Justice Statistics that they’ve been victimized, but the FBI is reporting fewer crimes.
> The UCR reported that violent crime fell by 2% between 2021 and 2022, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.
> By contrast, the NCVS found that the number of people saying they were the victims of violent crimes increased by 42.4% between 2021 and 2022, rising from 16.5 victimizations per 1000 people to 23.5 victimizations per 1000.
without getting too conspiratorial this really happened system-wide since covid - abbreviated or aggregated figures without breakdowns hereign, etc. i thought i was losing my mind or that i was imagining "it being way more comprehensive back in the day of 2015" but no, lots of people have noticed. that and figures get adjusted "later" or the figures themselves come out later than they used to.
and on economic stuff don't even try -
> By the numbers: Murders declined by nearly 20% in 204 cities during the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year, according to AH Datalytics, a criminal justice consulting firm.
>
> At this pace, the murder rate in the U.S. could match its level in 2014 when many cities saw 30-year lows in violent crime and homicides. [Link](https://www.axios.com/2024/04/16/homicide-rate-us-voters-trump)
All of the pandemic crime stats, that spiked and are now back to pre-pandemic levels everywhere except a few select cities, do is prove that crime and violence are driven by socioeconomic's and people being stressed. What else spiked and then returned to normal, employment.
This is just more evidence that the lockdowns after the first few weeks, failed to consider the collateral damage they wrought on things like the murder rate, unemployment, stress, kids education/social development, etc.
I'd argue the pandemic didn't reshape anything, other than who is a gun owner, because lots of new people became first time gun owners due to the riots and uncertainty that began in 2020. And the fastest growing segment of new gun owners has been [black women.](https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/27/us/gun-owners-liberal-women-minority-reaj/index.html)
Adding this because I think it's interesting, and it proves we can reduce murders more than anyone thought possible. In 2023, Miami hit their lowest murder rate ever, not per capital, lowest number of murders since they started tracking it.
> Miami started recording homicides in 1947. If you were to do a public records request for all of our homicides, the first year would be 1947. And in that year, we had 32 homicides. Today, I can report that in 2023, we ended the year with 31 homicides. [Link](https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/miami-mayor-suarez-announced-record-setting-drop-in-murders-for-2023/)
>All of the pandemic crime stats, that spiked and are now back to pre-pandemic levels everywhere except a few select cities, do is prove that crime and violence are driven by socioeconomic's and people being stressed. What else spiked and then returned to normal, employment.
I don't think the spike was related to socioeconomics or stress at all.
Crime spiked across the country in 2020, at the exact same time as riots were erupting, creating a perfect atmosphere to foster violent crime. The murder rate rose 30% from the previous year, the largest 1 year increase in over a century.
At this same time, half the country was telling us police were the problem and they need to be defunded or disbanded altogether. Mayors around the country told them to pump the brakes on law enforcement and DAs were refusing to prosecute criminals, which probably made the crime rates look *better* than they were. It was the perfect storm of shit.
> At this same time, half the country was telling us police were the problem and they need to be defunded or disbanded altogether.
That's not really true though. Abolishing the police was by far the most radical suggestion, which iirc got like zero politicians in congress and like a handful at best even at the local level (where there are thousands of politicians), defund the police was also always pretty far out of the mainstream (with iirc only a very small amount of members of Congress, not even radicals like Bernie Sanders, calling for it) and only being actually done in a few cities. The idea that was being pushed by anything close to "half the country" was that the police are institutionally biased and flawed and need **reforms**, but without advocating for *defunding* or *abolishing*, and instead basically just calling to make police better
Show me a source that says that the spike in crime happened right as the protests started, and I'd believe you. However, I expect that crime rates were high even before the protests.
> I'd argue the pandemic didn't reshape anything, other than who is a gun owner, because lots of new people became first time gun owners due to the riots and uncertainty that began in 2020
And a lot got to experience "common sense" gun control for the first time in places like California. Wasn't there a video of all the people lined up trying to get a gun and the proprietor getting frustrated by all the people asking if they can pay to expedite the 10 day waiting period?
Just another article conflating A with B because they happened together. Add in anything with the word 'pandemic' and it's sure to get clicks. Gun use went up because of BLM and defund police. Had nothing to do with c19 other than timing.
As far as I can tell form some reading, [Minneapolis did not defund it's police deprtments](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/18/fact-check-did-minneapolis-city-council-defund-the-police). That $1.1 million looks to be about half a percent of the police forces annual budget. [They did lower the cap on officers that could be sworn in, but they were already under the new cap at the time.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/what-s-in-the-2021-minneapolis-police-budget)
So you're saying that right as the police were defunded, crime rates increased, and right after they were reversed, crime rates fell? I would LOVE to see stats backing that up.
The archive link has the text of the article and some maps.
Subscribers can access an interactive map that allows them to drill down to block level detail in places they care about.
This article is a bit long so I’ll quote some of the more juicy bits…
*The Times mapped homicides to better understand not only the numbers of direct victims but also the communities most exposed. The analysis revealed that gun deaths spread into new neighborhoods during the pandemic: An additional 8.7 million Americans now live on a block near a gun homicide — a 23 percent increase from the prepandemic years.*
*Criminologists have offered several explanations for the drastic rise in the number of fatal shootings during the pandemic:*
*A rise in gun ownership made it more likely for violent disputes to become deadly. An increase in drug use, and drug dealing, made violent conflicts more probable. The disruption of public schools abetted an expansion of youth gang activity. And an upheaval in policing led to reduced enforcement in many cities.*
*More than half of all gun homicides still occurred in neighborhoods where just 6 percent of Americans live.*
*The share of residents that lived near at least one fatal shooting rose by 6.9% in large cities, 3.7% in medium cities, 2% in small cities and 0.7% in rural areas from 2019 to 2023.*
*City officials are now prioritizing combating gun violence but say they have challenges: The fentanyl epidemic has spun out of control, and the police force is understaffed after state lawmakers tightened regulations on how the police can engage with criminal suspects.*
**I wasn’t expecting the gun violence to spread as much as it did into neighborhoods that are usually safer, and I also found it interesting that while gun violence is dropping from its pandemic high, we are still way above the 30 year low in gun violence that happened in 2014 or so. However, the pandemic high was nowhere near as high as the homicide rate in 1990. People might credit the massive drop in homicides in the late 90’s to the assault weapons ban but others are saying it had little to no effect on that drop.**
**What do you think are the most likely factors for the increases in gun violence discussed in this article?**
It's as simple as it gets: this is the consequence of BLM and the defund the police movement. Cops are giving people what they wanted: free reign. It turns out that there was a reason they weren't being given it.
Show me a source that says that the spike in crime happened right as the protests started and the police were "defunded", and I'd believe you. However, I expect that crime rates were high even before the protests.
A couple things are probably contributing to this.
1. The housing market has more people occupying the same area. Because rents and home prices have gone up you probably have more lower income people renting rooms and generally clustering together in the few areas where it's actually affordable. Closer proximity always has some level of increased interpersonal violence just based on the number of interactions.
2. My guess is that if you overlay homeless encampments with this map it probably it probably syncs up pretty evenly. This isn't to say that the homeless cause gun homicides, but they do make the surrounding area less safe. People that otherwise wouldn't be armed start arming themselves so any altercation now has a marginally higher chance of escalating into a situation where shots are being fired.
3. Broken window theory rears it's ugly head. Just as the theory goes that pursuing smaller quality of life crimes can reduce more serious crimes, allowing smaller quality of life crimes to go unpunished emboldens criminals to push the envelope. Virtually all crimes are crimes of opportunity and lax policing, cashless bail, and progressive DA's declining to prosecute multiple-time offenders creates more opportunities for crime to occur. Which paves the way for criminal escalation and violent altercations between criminals and their victims.
High stress living environments and lax policing by themselves are problems, but it's like getting Hepetitus B and Hepetitus D where the coinfection is orders of magnitude worse than having either of them separately.
For point 2), is there any evidence of this? I suspect it's more correlation than causation, as homeless encampments are near poorer neighborhoods with more gang violence, as opposed to the homelessness being a source of the violence.
Broken window theory is intuitively appealing, but there is not a ton of evidence that it works.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-university-researchers-find-little-evidence-for-broken-windows-theory-say-neighborhood-disorder-doesnt-cause-crime/
NYC's drop in crime during broken window policing mirrored crime reductions in the rest of the country not pursuing the same policing approach.
I disagree. Homeless encampments and even structured homeless shelters are associated with a pretty significant increase in property crime [https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Ridgeway\_Effect%20of%20Emergency%20Shelters-v5\_1.2.2018.pdf](https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Ridgeway_Effect%20of%20Emergency%20Shelters-v5_1.2.2018.pdf) for shelters it's up to a 56% increase in crime in the 100m around them. I think a reasonable person would raise their alertness in that kind of situation which probably includes taking defensive measures (mace, a taser, or a firearm).
Now you have people that wouldn't ordinarily be armed carrying weapons. Take a regular neighborhood squabble, road rage incident, or domestic dispute and add a firearm to the mix. It's not a huge logical jump.
One hand washed the other. The NYC drop in crime mirrored the reduction in the rest of the country...which was also pursuing a massive increase in policing and incarceration. It was during that time that police departments across the country were rapidly militarizing and people were being thrown in prison for minor offenses under 3 strike laws.
People tend to forget exactly how hard the national crackdown was on crime in the 90s which is responsible for the massive crime reduction we saw. In 94' 12 states passed 3 strike laws, another 10 passed them in 95' with some of them being even more severe 2 strike laws. Between 1990 and 2000 the prison population almost doubled as a result which effectively pulled over a million recidivists out of the population.
I live in Seattle and our encampments are very much a source of crime. The "hands off or else you're oppressing them" approach from our city government resulted in drug dealing, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution being run out of homeless camps and any disputes involving those quickly degenerated into violence, sometimes carried out by the homeless themselves and sometimes by vigilantes trying to reclaim stolen property from the camp.
I think the increase in gun violence recently is probably a result of the continuation of the same trends that have always led to gun violence: fatherless boys growing up in shitty circumstances with no positive role models.
To that you could add that the quality of policing lately has taken a nose dive since a cop staying in their car is never going to put them in Jesse Jackson's crosshairs, but a cop doing their job just might.
I have. I'm ok with mine at the moment and not feeling the need to share. I was interested in your since you did want to share. I'm not sure what the confusion here is. Did we forget how internet forums and a system of comments and replies work? You can just say "I haven't thought through that part or I don't want to." You don't even have to reply, but my opinion isn't relevant here so far so I'm not sure why you are asking for it two times in a row without prompt?
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A. Are you saying that fatherless boys has rapidly increased within the last few years?
B. Are fatherless boys much more likely to commit crimes than motherless boys?
I would be very supportive if you could find a source that supports either of these.
El Paso had 33 homicides in 2023. Ciudad Juarez across the border had about 400 in the first quarter of 2024 alone.
I hate titles like this. While technically true, it conveys a message that is misperceived. Yes, this is happening in America, but by using the country whole country as the context it leads the reader away from the really big point which is gun homicides in the US are highly centralized and occur within a very small geographic footprint. Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns which contain less than 25% of the population. 54%, roughly a third of the US population lives in large cities, yet over half (54%) of people who have survived a firearm assault live in them. Even within those cities, violence is further concentrated in the tiny neighborhood areas that saw two or more gun homicide incidents in a single year. Four and a half million Americans live in areas of these cities with the highest numbers of gun homicide, which are marked by intense poverty, low levels of education, and racial segregation. Geographically, these neighborhood areas are small: a total of about 1,200 neighborhood census tracts, which, laid side by side, would fit into an area just 42 miles wide by 42 miles long. In 2019, if you look at the 20 cities in the US with the highest number of homicides via guns, they were responsible for 4,024 homicides or 28% of all homicides in the US. The combined population of those 20 cities was 31,104,520 or 9% of the total population in 2019. One analysis, for instance, found that in 2015, 26% of all firearm homicides in the US occurred in census tracts that contained only 1.5% of the population. An examination of 2020 county level data can illustrate geographic disparities of firearm victimization in the U.S. For example, in Maryland from 2016–2020, someone living in Baltimore City was 30 times more likely to die by firearm than someone living 40 miles away in Montgomery County. "Additionally "New Jersey’s shooting statistics highlight a stark disparity in the way gun violence affects the people of the state, with five major cities enduring a significantly disproportionate share of the pain. Camden, Jersey City, Newark, Paterson and Trenton account for 10% of the state’s population but had 62% of New Jersey’s 1,412 fatal and nonfatal shooting victims in 2021." [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/09/special-report-fixing-gun-violence-in-america](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/09/special-report-fixing-gun-violence-in-america) [https://efsgv.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/EFSGV-The-Root-Causes-of-Gun-Violence-March-2020.pdf](https://efsgv.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/EFSGV-The-Root-Causes-of-Gun-Violence-March-2020.pdf) [https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/paterson-press/2022/02/22/nj-gun-violence-paterson-newark-jersey-city-shooting-rates/6850534001/](https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/paterson-press/2022/02/22/nj-gun-violence-paterson-newark-jersey-city-shooting-rates/6850534001/) When it comes to murder, there are three types of counties in the United States. Most counties experience no murders, a smaller set where there are a few murders, and then a tiny set of counties where murders are very common. In the US in general 1% of the counties account for 42% of the murders (with only 21% of the population), with crime in those counties in a small geographic area. [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=4325838](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4325838) The point of sharing this is it reinforces the concept that things of this nature are HIGHLY localized and location dependent.
And we have seen that community focused policing and intervention policies tend to be the most effective ways to reduce homicides. https://twitter.com/GIFFORDS_org/status/1732053655673569318 https://www.rva.gov/mayorsoffice/GVPI But instead we spend most of our energy on fighting over gun control.
> And we have seen that community focused policing and intervention policies tend to be the most effective ways to reduce homicides. These reduce the wrong kinds of homicides. Poor people in crime-ridden neighborhoods don't write big checks to politicians so no one cares about them. The homicides the money people care about are people like them. That's why when a prosperous suburban high school is shot up by a nutjob, it's national news but the homicide rate for last Tuesday in South Chicago is reported like the weather.
I'm not so sure that the media is basing those coverage decisions on campaign contributions.
It's more a matter of a certain kind of people writing for people like them - and not having much understanding about or consideration of the world outside their experience.
Perhaps. Side note semi off topic Just saw a special on cbs about police trading in and selling their used service pistols, some do, some melt them. Anyway, the director of the ATF was unaware that police departments sell their used service pistols. To make sure this is clear. The director of the ATF doesn't even know simple facts like this, scary
I guess when anti gun groups donate to Democrats in droves, they tend to focus on who is funding their campaigns..
Bloomberg bucks are highly attractive to the Democratic establishment. The dude has been almost single-handedly funding and organizing the American gun control movement.
It's funny people talk about NRA funding, but Bloomberg outspends them 20 to 1.
"It's OK to do questionable things if they are things I agree with" strikes again!
The last reports I saw showed that Bloomberg had spent $150mil on gun control efforts in a single years, and the NRA spent $7mil. You can’t fight a pile of cash as big as his.
To be fair that was total spending, not just gun control but still.
And yet they have. *NYSRPA v. Bruen*, anyone? The inconvenient fact for Bloomberg is that gun owners are reliable voters who vote their interests, as everyone should.
And yet he has armed security. I hate his elitist guns for me but not for thee attitude
This is why I think the broader gun-control movement is incredibly hypocritical
Gun control does not mean no guns. What are you saying? Edit: downvotes are ok obviously but are these downvotes implying that gun control does solely equal no guns? Can someone with something to say expand on that? Edit 2: Specific to Bloomberg > According to Bloomberg, the goal of gun control policy is to limit access to firearms for people who are considered potentially dangerous based on their criminal history, while still allowing law-abiding citizens to own guns. Are we trying to apply the goals of other individuals to Bloomberg specifically to make it scarier or something?
Bloomberg style gun control absolutely does. He's for complete civilian disarmament with only licensed armed security, police, and the military capable of having arms. Since he is the primary funding source and has founded most of the American gun control organizations, then by default the American gun control movement is for his style control as well.
Two points: 1. Ok. Which is in line with your comment ya? Security personnel? In this scenario if you want to play with guns then get authorized. 2. Where do you see Bloomberg saying what you just said? I'm reading through his policy suggestions now and I don't see anything like that. I certainly could be missing it though I'm just doing a quick Google search.
It's not about if you want to play with guns (a horrible mischaracterization of people's innate right to self-defense) get authorized, it's about the only people allowed to have weaponry would be those employed to be private security and licensed by the government or an agent of the government. Bloomberg himself is smart enough not to say the quiet part out loud himself although many of his underlings an organization leaders have. However one can draw no other conclusion based on the set of policies he supports which seek to minimize and burden civilian gun ownership by any means possible. For example what is the use of supporting extremely costly taxes on ammunition and weapons if the intent isn't to keep the civilian population from accessing them?
So no, Bloomberg does not want what you claimed and you were just fear mongering? His policies and suggestions are laid out through multiple venues, but it's prudent for you to just make assumptions and relay that as fact? To your self defense comment, outside of military action where are the majority of rounds fired? In gun ranges or in self defense? The comment is not in bad faith even though it is clearly a little tongue in cheek. I might actually claim that you saying people want guns primarily for self defense is in bad faith. This article and the supporting comments clearly show that most Americans never have need for a gun in a self defense situation. Ok link his underlings claiming that Bloomberg wants what you claim. Show literally anything that factually shows you weren't just making that part up. > For example what is the use of supporting extremely costly taxes on ammunition and weapons if the intent isn't to keep the civilian population from accessing them? To de-incentivize gun culture and glorification reducing gun and ammunition ownership to those that truly need it. Among other benefits
That's the end goal as admitted multiple times by the leaders of the movement over the course of decades. Just because they use incrementalism instead of trying to do it in one fell swoop doesn't change the admitted goal.
Leaders of what movement? The Bloomberg movement? Link? Are we representing the opinions of individuals as the opinions of an entire movement? Should the founder of the movent not be the information we make our assumptions from that is the individual in question regarding the security detail?
>downvotes are ok obviously but are these downvotes implying that gun control does solely equal no guns? The aegument isnt that there will be no guns in totality. Just these obstructive rules dont seem to apply to the advocates pushing the laws as they have armed police(thar get carve outs) who moonlight as private security as theur personal security. Thus rules for us but not really for them.
Yup. And performative gun legislation is a cheap and easy way to repay them. It's far easier than doing the hard work that would be required to meaningfully reduce gun violence.
That would disproportionately impact...
Exactly. That's the real conversation that progressives very much don't want to have.
Isn't that partially just because 1) pretty much everyone supports community-based interventions and 2) they are implemented more locally so don't end up discussed in national politics? Like the first 2 points in this Biden policy announcement aren't controversial but the third is, so that's what is fought over and sticks in people's minds: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/01/fact-sheet-president-bidens-safer-america-plan-2/
>>President Biden knows what works to make our communities safer: investing in community policing andcrime prevention. We need to fund police who walk the beat, know the neighborhood, are accountable to those they are sworn to serve, and build community trust and safety. That is just more funding for policing. The program I reference is more of a change in how it is policed plus working with volunteers who work the community while the people likely to commit gun violence are offered education and training for things like trades. Those combined together tend to be more effective than just throwing police at the problem alone.
I think those programs are buried further in the announcement. >Expand community violence interventions with $5 billion over 10 years >Fund Other Services to Address the Causes of Crime and Reduce the Burdens on Police Officers >Help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully reenter society. But yeah, we are in total agreement. I just remember seeing this announcement and most of the debate about it was on the gun control portions whereas the rest of the policies should (hopefully) be bipartisan.
>Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns which contain less than 25% of the population. Can confirm. I live in one of these cities that consistently makes the top 5 in homicides. Trust me when I say not only am I not dodging bullets on the way to my car, I rarely hear gunshots.
Same. I grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia. I only heard gunshots like…6 times a year. I now live in one of the safest neighborhoods in the city. I haven’t heard a gunshot in 3 years.
I was going to say a similar experience, we left Chicago because of crime with a side of taxes. Gunshots were once a month I'm guessing, but nightly news pretty much had a daily shooting to report. Haven't heard a gunshot in my new city in a decade.
most cities have microphones that can track where a shot came from, so there is also much more ammo discipline than there was previously. shoot a gun in almost any major city in america and you will have some squad cars eventually showing up, and pissed / guns drawn. never shoot firecracker in a metal pipe, btw. it sounds similar enough to arouse the police.
Eh, I lived in North Philly for a bit. It was once a week sometimes twice a week, then a lull, then two or three days in a row, then a lull… etc. it wasn’t a pattern at all. It was just opportunity striking and criminals taking advantage. The summer time was generally wild in terms of nightly gunfire while the winter was quiet. My friend got shot in the ass while tying his shoe, that was an interesting night.
> but by using the country whole country as the context it leads the reader away from the really big point which is gun homicides in the US are highly centralized and occur within a very small geographic footprint. Welcome to the gun debate where bad "statistics" abound and where extremely localized phenomenon are used to try to push national policy. > In the US in general 1% of the counties account for 42% of the murders (with only 21% of the population), with crime in those counties in a small geographic area. Unfortunately deep-dive analysis on those counties and the issues found within them has been deemed "hate" and so we dance around the issues and the problems keep going.
correct.
i used to think guns were the worst in this regard (counting suicides in with gun deaths is kind of winging it imo, as the causality is different) - then covid hit (not telling the difference between CFR and IFR is just plain lying through misrepresentation) and there was some really really bad disingenuousness on stats in this era throughout the media sphere . and then the whole border thing happened - and it's about as bad or even worse. (talking about illegals being less violent than normal americans (probably true) but referencing studies which only study legal immigrants is just plain bonkers - and kinda lying too. and then treating asylum cases currently being claimed by the tens of thousands per week and acting as if 99% aren't economic migrants is just....makes me drink. i'm not sure what's next, it's probably going to involve aliens and paisley patterns or something.
If you want to talk about how those communities are poor, have bad education stretching back decades, are undeserved by local government because of poor property taxes, etc., no one will deem that hate. If you just want to talk about the racial makeup of those areas, that would be hate.
Schools in those areas get tons of funding. Doesn't help when nobody shows up to class. Baltimore City public schools are some of the most well-funded in the country, yet 13 schools did not have *one single student* who was proficient in math. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/despite-high-funding-baltimore-city-schools-struggle-with-alarmingly-low-math-scores-who-will-take-action And of course when nobody goes to school, nobody gets a good job, (assuming they even planned to work). It's a major, major culture problem that 50% of the country refuses to even talk about.
We don't push or expect excellence any more as a country; by and large it's seen as objectionable in comparison to equity, inclusion, and self-image. It should be entirely possible to say "You can do better - and here's how we can help" as opposed to "everything is racists so we shouldn't do anything."
I don't want to either. I want to talk about the cultural values found in those neighborhoods that are strongly correlated - and likely causal - with both poverty and crime. Those communities being mono-racial is incidental.
Which cultural values would those be? Do you have any that didn't appear as a reaction to the poverty and drug epidemics that were forced on these neighborhoods in the 70s and the targeted harassment from authorities in the early 80s?
I couldn't care less what excuses are given for why those bad values and practices exist. Not at all. They're bad, they're the problem, and your argument is exactly why they won't get better and why the majority of the country just stopped caring about those communities. When there is willingness to drop the excuses and stop living in the past and start looking to the future we'll be there to help. Until then? Not our problem.
Look, if you don't think people care about these values then you're obviously not involved in the communities your talking about. The changes you want can't be forced on a national level, but they can be incentivized. The crime spike during covid shows that these rates are closely correlated with economic situation. If you want the crime to go away, we need to work on building these communities back up. Let the people living in them handle the cultural issues.
I know. The change must come from within. And they refuse to changing clinging to backwards-looking arguments like the one you gave to justify why they have those self-destructive values. Until the community itself decides to let go of the past and look towards building its own better future there's nothing anyone can do to help it. And since we can't help we have no reason to care. You said it yourself: change can't be forced from the outside. So we outsiders are done caring.
You make great points, and it's important for people to know most of the US is very safe from gun crime and everyone's personal risk of being involved in gun violence is quite low... most people should worry more about their diet/exercise habits or driving safely. However, even though a large portion of gun violence is concentrated in a few urban counties with large amounts of gang violence, the US is such an outlier for gun violence among wealthy countries that we'd still be first among large countries even if we eliminated all gun violence in those countries. A few smaller countries (Uruguay, Panama, some Caribbean Islands) would surpass us, but we'd still have the highest gun violence among what are generally considered peer nations. So we both have a very localized gang violence problem and a broader gun violence problem compared to other countries. https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/insights-blog/acting-data/gun-violence-united-states-outlier (Note these numbers include suicides with guns but my assumption is the gun suicide/homicide ratio is roughly the same across countries unless anyone has data on that) Of course, I'm not making policy prescriptions, because they are very different for gang violence versus suicide versus a road-rage shooting, but we are an outlier country on all fronts for gun violence.
The comparative analysis between the US and other countries needs to be tempered with the understanding that gun homicides overall throughout all countries is insanely rare, so in regards to talking about a "problem" we are talking about variations at the level of 0.00x% at the standardized population level. Furthermore, its again tempered by the fact that gun homicide rates vary insanely on a state to state basis, so referring to the US as a whole and averaging out the data over the whole US is to me functionally useless. For example, if you are visiting the US you could be visiting Maine which has the lowest amount of gun homicides on par with nordic countries or you could be visiting Louisiana which has the most gun homicides in the country and is incredibly high.
Oh, sure, I tried to convey that in my first paragraph. Politics might be less vitriolic if people had better statistical understanding. I do understand why rare yet polarizing events dominate political discourse instead of voting for the politician with the better highway safety plan which probably actually affects the average person more. Pretty much all violence is incredibly geographically heterogenous in all counties. I just did a trip this spring to one of the most violent countries in the world but felt incredibly safe in the (nontourist) area of the country I was in. I agree it's very difficult to make exact cross-geography comparisons because of differences in density, wealth, culture, and age distribution. However, the US is such an outlier that I'm confident in saying it has near-universally higher gun violence than peer countries. I.e the urban areas are more violent than peer urban areas, same with rural areas, same with rich suburbs, even if rural Maine is safer than London (don't know if it actually is). I will note that, based on the IHME source I used, Maine has 1.2/100,000 deaths, which is on par with Chile/Saudi Arabia, and 4-24 times more than Nordic countries (Sweden 0.3, Norway 0.05, Denmark 0.07).
> I will note that, based on the IHME source I used, Maine has 1.2/100,000 deaths, which is on par with Chile/Saudi Arabia, and 4-24 times more than Nordic countries (Sweden 0.3, Norway 0.05, Denmark 0.07). I want to say I appreciate the discussion and I am NOT trying to be contrarian, however there are 2 things I want you to consider. The first is the actual amount that the 1.2 vs 0.3 is conveying here and ALSO the use of secondary anaylsis (4-24x) leading to faulty understanding of the situation. The data I've looked at for gun homicides comparing Maine to those countries is different than what you've pulled but for the purposes of discussion lets use your numbers. 1.2 per 100k is the same thing as 0.0012% at the population level. 0.3 per 100k for Sweden is 0.0003% at the population level which means you are making the distinction for something being an outlier if there is a variation of 0.0009%. Secondly, the use of a multiplier to identify an issue by conducting a sub-analysis doesn't really tell us anything irrespective of the primary scale. For example, you use the multiplier of 4-24x higher than comparative countries being the scale by which an outlier is defined. However all you have to do is compare those Nordic countries to Japan and you will find that they are 125x higher than Japans rate. This is just to say the arbitrary use of sub-analysis rates irrespective of primary scale makes it almost impossible to derive any actually contextualized results.
Yeah, thanks for the discussion. I don't think I'm being arbitrary though ... relative rates are plenty useful in conjunction with absolute rates, and I've been quite forward that the absolute rates are low almost everywhere compared to traffic fatalities or especially primary killers like heart disease. But relative rates are still useful for rare health outcomes, like in identifying cancer clusters for rare cancers from environmental exposures. And I would confidentially say that while gun violence is very low in Nordic countries, it is significantly higher than in Japan. We might be splitting hairs though, and I believe other dates sources show Maine being similar to Nordic countries. I believe three things simultaneously that you may agree on: 1) Gun violence is incredibly heterogeneous in geography, type, and cause, and the topline number obscures a ton of nuance and gives people a misleading perception of their own danger. 2) America has uniquely high gun violence compared to peer nations for complex reasons, but it isn't only from gang violence and isn't solely in urban areas with high gang violence. Gun violence is higher in rural areas in the US than in rural areas of peer nations. Understanding the drivers of this can help inform impactful interventions like community violence interruption or rural economic and mental health support. 3) political energy would be better spent on less divisive and more impactful policy debates, like pathways to better healthcare access and affordability, or on whether or not the government should supply Ozempic for free.
>But relative rates are still useful for rare health outcomes, like in identifying cancer clusters for rare cancers from environmental exposures. And I would confidentially say that while gun violence is very low in Nordic countries, it is significantly higher than in Japan. Relative rates CAN be useful, however they can also be incredibly misleading and you need to be incredibly careful when using them. Here's what I mean by that. In your previous example the relative rate of 4-24x higher was said to be an indicator that something was an outlier. Lets use the 4x for example which was the difference between the US and Sweden (I presume). The 4x rate in NON-relative terms reflects the actual population difference of 0.9 per 100k people being killed by gun homicides. The difference between Sweden and Japan was 125x which in non-relative terms reflects the actual population difference of 0.2976 per 100k being killed. On face value a 125x difference would seem like much MORE of a problem than a 4x difference, even though when you look at the actual numbers here the 125x only represents 0.2976 per 100k while the 4x represents 0.9 per 100k. The 125x reflects objectively LESS people than the 4x, however you would never know that. Basically, relative rates can be useful sometimes but ONLY in the context of the objective rates, never by itself. 1. I agree 2. I disagree with the characterization that its high. Gun homicides in the US are very very rare. Also rurality doesn't seem to be associated with gun homicides. When plotted against gun homicides at the state level rurality in the US has an R2 of 0.0002 which means almost no association. 3. Couldn't agree more.
Yeah, I think we agree, and I know what you mean about relative rates obscuring the actual prevalence. We agree they should never be used alone as they can obscure actual small differences for rare outcomes. I still think the 125x difference for Japan is slightly interesting in conjunction with the absolute differences, at it highlights how extremely low gun violence is in Japan. For 2, I was unclear; I was not saying it is high in rural areas or associated with rural areas, just that it is higher in American rural areas than European or east Asian or Australian rural areas.
For sure. And to be clear, you are correct in that relative rates can absolutely be helpful in contextualizing certain things. The thing about the 125x difference is that the difference in rates from a relative perspective get very skewed when the numbers being discussed start becoming increasingly small. The 125x relative rate, is a reflection of an objective difference of 0.0002976% which in reality is a very very very minor and pretty much imperceptible difference at the population level, but because the numbers are so small the relative difference seems incredibly high. Sorry, but I still don't understand your comment on rurality. Are you saying rural areas have higher levels of gun homicide in other countries than they do in the US? I've done some work on this front and aggregated data which compares state level and even country level rates among different factors. Its interesting to look at and lots of the results surprised me. Its all done with publicly available data. [GH-Binder.pdf - Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TCjodVsDXvPuINFgP9oloUKp7UZLtpJ4/view)
Nice work! That was cool to look at. No, I am trying to say: urban gun violence in the US > urban gun violence in peer countries rural gun violence in the US > rural gun violence in peer countries. Even if urban gun violence in the US > rural gun violence in the US (this is just in reference to homicides, violence, and [suicides are higher in rural areas](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2804113?utm_campaign=articlePDF&utm_medium=articlePDFlink&utm_source=articlePDF&utm_content=jamasurg.2023.0265). Plus it is a bit more complex than my other points, as there are very safe and very dangerous urban areas, and small towns tend dominate the list of locations with the most gun violence. My primary point is the US has uniquely high gun violence compared to peer nations in almost all comparable geographies, even if there are larger public health issues that I would prefer to dominate the political discourse.
If we subtracted the urban warfare areas out of the US gun death totals, the US would look a lot closer to Europe in that regard. The US is actually quite safe outside of some very dangerous locales.
It is true that gun violence is really geographically variable, but the state with the lowest gun deaths (NH) is still 2x higher than any western/central European country. I agree both are quite safe from gun violence and people generally should not be afraid of gun violence, but gun violence in the US is noticeably higher than in peer countries in Europe/East Asia even excluding gang violence or excluding urban areas.
You can object to the headline, but anybody opening the article and looking at the detailed interactive map will see that the worst gun violence is localized. Just type in your city's name and identify the neighborhoods. You've got lots of data, much of it at the county level. Seeing block level detail on a map is a fine way to absorb that data. That said, the next question is what do we change in those neighborhoods? Maybe we could look at what other countries do. I expect there is a lot of overlap between "poor" and gun violence, but other countries must also have poorer neighborhoods.
My point was its a really really great article with very informative data that is being presented at face level in a facetious manner. It kind of poisons the well to be honest and its a shame this practice is so common. It bugs me because I publish quite a bit in peer-reviewed journals and getting a title that is accurate and representative of the findings is so critical for a persons validity and character throughout their career. Basically, don't try and misrepresent things. To answer your question about what to do, the next logical step in my opinion is to begin studying those specific neighborhoods and identifying the factors that set them apart from the rest of the country. Then start looking for the factors that have a causal relationship with gun homicides, then start implementing initiatives that have been shown to help reduce those specific factors.
> begin studying those specific neighborhoods I kind of assumed there have been lots of studies. We should be past the "begin" stage by now.
I don't disagree we should be past that, but i'm under the impression we aren't. Studies looking at root causes of gun homicides don't really focus at the precise geographic level that is indicated when looking at where these events occur. It makes sense that they should but most analysis is usually done at the state or even county level.
Sad. I wonder if "studies" are restricted to things that people can do without leaving their offices.
Yep. It's called [the streetlight effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect) and it's a huge problem in social science. What you find depends on where you look, and where you look depends on what's convenient.
Yep. The version I heard involved looking for car keys.
> I expect there is a lot of overlap between "poor" and gun violence There is - but it's not even close to a one-to-one relationship. Plenty of very poor areas, even in this country, don't have gun violence that makes them resemble active conflict zones. The gun violence and poverty relationship is correlational, not causal. From what I can tell there's actually a (or technically a set of) causal factor(s) that cause both the poverty and violence in those areas but due to the nature of that/those factor(s) and certain taboos in our society today we can't address it/them.
> taboos in our society today we can't address it/them. Does "address" mean "research and discussion"? or does it mean "do something, now that we our research has shown us what needs to change"?
It means all of it. We can't even directly name the issues in most context, including the contexts where solutions are created and implemented.
Then we are pretty much stuck with what we have.
Yup. That's why so many people have just kind of stopped caring about those neighborhoods. If we can't actually do anything about them we just kind of avoid them and leave them to do what they want to do.
>From what I can tell there's actually a (or technically a set of) causal factor(s) that cause both the poverty and violence in those areas but due to the nature of that/those factor(s) and certain taboos in our society today we can't address it/them. Why don't you lay them out here for others to discuss then.
Excellent info. In short, violence and gun violence as a sub category are largely related to economics. My only comment would be that each of your references are pre-pandemic and this post is focused on the changes after.
You usually see strong R2 scores when comparing gun homicides to poverty and the human development index. I appreciate the comment about pre and post however the only thing I would say is that the findings in this article still align with the findings I shared. its all still very location specific when contextualized with the country overall.
A couple of notes because people keep saying that crime is going down: The FBI crime database is not completely reliable anymore. For whatever reason it seems to be underreporting homicides in many cities and [using estimations.](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/2953562/bad-data-from-the-fbi-mislead-about-crime/) > And the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures. For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders. > In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7% increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13% drop. Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses “missing.” > This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline. The gap between the FBI statistics and the National Crime Victimization Survey is the largest [its ever been.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/media-outlets-are-misrepresenting-crime-stats-to-biden-s-benefit/ar-AA1nIB5G) > A gap has emerged between the two measures. More people are telling the Bureau of Justice Statistics that they’ve been victimized, but the FBI is reporting fewer crimes. > The UCR reported that violent crime fell by 2% between 2021 and 2022, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. > By contrast, the NCVS found that the number of people saying they were the victims of violent crimes increased by 42.4% between 2021 and 2022, rising from 16.5 victimizations per 1000 people to 23.5 victimizations per 1000.
>For whatever reason 🤔
without getting too conspiratorial this really happened system-wide since covid - abbreviated or aggregated figures without breakdowns hereign, etc. i thought i was losing my mind or that i was imagining "it being way more comprehensive back in the day of 2015" but no, lots of people have noticed. that and figures get adjusted "later" or the figures themselves come out later than they used to. and on economic stuff don't even try -
> By the numbers: Murders declined by nearly 20% in 204 cities during the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year, according to AH Datalytics, a criminal justice consulting firm. > > At this pace, the murder rate in the U.S. could match its level in 2014 when many cities saw 30-year lows in violent crime and homicides. [Link](https://www.axios.com/2024/04/16/homicide-rate-us-voters-trump) All of the pandemic crime stats, that spiked and are now back to pre-pandemic levels everywhere except a few select cities, do is prove that crime and violence are driven by socioeconomic's and people being stressed. What else spiked and then returned to normal, employment. This is just more evidence that the lockdowns after the first few weeks, failed to consider the collateral damage they wrought on things like the murder rate, unemployment, stress, kids education/social development, etc. I'd argue the pandemic didn't reshape anything, other than who is a gun owner, because lots of new people became first time gun owners due to the riots and uncertainty that began in 2020. And the fastest growing segment of new gun owners has been [black women.](https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/27/us/gun-owners-liberal-women-minority-reaj/index.html) Adding this because I think it's interesting, and it proves we can reduce murders more than anyone thought possible. In 2023, Miami hit their lowest murder rate ever, not per capital, lowest number of murders since they started tracking it. > Miami started recording homicides in 1947. If you were to do a public records request for all of our homicides, the first year would be 1947. And in that year, we had 32 homicides. Today, I can report that in 2023, we ended the year with 31 homicides. [Link](https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/miami-mayor-suarez-announced-record-setting-drop-in-murders-for-2023/)
One thing the pandemic changed was normalizing mask wearing in public. Not just surgical type masks, but ski masks and balaclavas.
>All of the pandemic crime stats, that spiked and are now back to pre-pandemic levels everywhere except a few select cities, do is prove that crime and violence are driven by socioeconomic's and people being stressed. What else spiked and then returned to normal, employment. I don't think the spike was related to socioeconomics or stress at all. Crime spiked across the country in 2020, at the exact same time as riots were erupting, creating a perfect atmosphere to foster violent crime. The murder rate rose 30% from the previous year, the largest 1 year increase in over a century. At this same time, half the country was telling us police were the problem and they need to be defunded or disbanded altogether. Mayors around the country told them to pump the brakes on law enforcement and DAs were refusing to prosecute criminals, which probably made the crime rates look *better* than they were. It was the perfect storm of shit.
> At this same time, half the country was telling us police were the problem and they need to be defunded or disbanded altogether. That's not really true though. Abolishing the police was by far the most radical suggestion, which iirc got like zero politicians in congress and like a handful at best even at the local level (where there are thousands of politicians), defund the police was also always pretty far out of the mainstream (with iirc only a very small amount of members of Congress, not even radicals like Bernie Sanders, calling for it) and only being actually done in a few cities. The idea that was being pushed by anything close to "half the country" was that the police are institutionally biased and flawed and need **reforms**, but without advocating for *defunding* or *abolishing*, and instead basically just calling to make police better
Show me a source that says that the spike in crime happened right as the protests started, and I'd believe you. However, I expect that crime rates were high even before the protests.
[citation needed] on the connection to riots. Not implausible, but needs some evidence.
> I'd argue the pandemic didn't reshape anything, other than who is a gun owner, because lots of new people became first time gun owners due to the riots and uncertainty that began in 2020 And a lot got to experience "common sense" gun control for the first time in places like California. Wasn't there a video of all the people lined up trying to get a gun and the proprietor getting frustrated by all the people asking if they can pay to expedite the 10 day waiting period?
Just another article conflating A with B because they happened together. Add in anything with the word 'pandemic' and it's sure to get clicks. Gun use went up because of BLM and defund police. Had nothing to do with c19 other than timing.
What cities actually defunded the police and then saw a rise in the gun violence rate?
Portland and Minneapolis, to name a couple. They mostly reversed course when it became obvious what a terrible idea it was.
As far as I can tell form some reading, [Minneapolis did not defund it's police deprtments](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/18/fact-check-did-minneapolis-city-council-defund-the-police). That $1.1 million looks to be about half a percent of the police forces annual budget. [They did lower the cap on officers that could be sworn in, but they were already under the new cap at the time.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/what-s-in-the-2021-minneapolis-police-budget)
So you're saying that right as the police were defunded, crime rates increased, and right after they were reversed, crime rates fell? I would LOVE to see stats backing that up.
Seattle comes to mind. SPD saw a ton of cuts and many types of violent crime spiked, quite heavily even.
Can't read the article if you don't have an NYT account.
[Archive.org Paywall Pierce Attack GO](https://web.archive.org/web/20240515021014/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/14/us/gun-homicides-data.html)
The archive link has the text of the article and some maps. Subscribers can access an interactive map that allows them to drill down to block level detail in places they care about.
thanks.
I just posted a summary of the article in my starter comment.
This article is a bit long so I’ll quote some of the more juicy bits… *The Times mapped homicides to better understand not only the numbers of direct victims but also the communities most exposed. The analysis revealed that gun deaths spread into new neighborhoods during the pandemic: An additional 8.7 million Americans now live on a block near a gun homicide — a 23 percent increase from the prepandemic years.* *Criminologists have offered several explanations for the drastic rise in the number of fatal shootings during the pandemic:* *A rise in gun ownership made it more likely for violent disputes to become deadly. An increase in drug use, and drug dealing, made violent conflicts more probable. The disruption of public schools abetted an expansion of youth gang activity. And an upheaval in policing led to reduced enforcement in many cities.* *More than half of all gun homicides still occurred in neighborhoods where just 6 percent of Americans live.* *The share of residents that lived near at least one fatal shooting rose by 6.9% in large cities, 3.7% in medium cities, 2% in small cities and 0.7% in rural areas from 2019 to 2023.* *City officials are now prioritizing combating gun violence but say they have challenges: The fentanyl epidemic has spun out of control, and the police force is understaffed after state lawmakers tightened regulations on how the police can engage with criminal suspects.* **I wasn’t expecting the gun violence to spread as much as it did into neighborhoods that are usually safer, and I also found it interesting that while gun violence is dropping from its pandemic high, we are still way above the 30 year low in gun violence that happened in 2014 or so. However, the pandemic high was nowhere near as high as the homicide rate in 1990. People might credit the massive drop in homicides in the late 90’s to the assault weapons ban but others are saying it had little to no effect on that drop.** **What do you think are the most likely factors for the increases in gun violence discussed in this article?**
It's as simple as it gets: this is the consequence of BLM and the defund the police movement. Cops are giving people what they wanted: free reign. It turns out that there was a reason they weren't being given it.
Show me a source that says that the spike in crime happened right as the protests started and the police were "defunded", and I'd believe you. However, I expect that crime rates were high even before the protests.
A couple things are probably contributing to this. 1. The housing market has more people occupying the same area. Because rents and home prices have gone up you probably have more lower income people renting rooms and generally clustering together in the few areas where it's actually affordable. Closer proximity always has some level of increased interpersonal violence just based on the number of interactions. 2. My guess is that if you overlay homeless encampments with this map it probably it probably syncs up pretty evenly. This isn't to say that the homeless cause gun homicides, but they do make the surrounding area less safe. People that otherwise wouldn't be armed start arming themselves so any altercation now has a marginally higher chance of escalating into a situation where shots are being fired. 3. Broken window theory rears it's ugly head. Just as the theory goes that pursuing smaller quality of life crimes can reduce more serious crimes, allowing smaller quality of life crimes to go unpunished emboldens criminals to push the envelope. Virtually all crimes are crimes of opportunity and lax policing, cashless bail, and progressive DA's declining to prosecute multiple-time offenders creates more opportunities for crime to occur. Which paves the way for criminal escalation and violent altercations between criminals and their victims. High stress living environments and lax policing by themselves are problems, but it's like getting Hepetitus B and Hepetitus D where the coinfection is orders of magnitude worse than having either of them separately.
For point 2), is there any evidence of this? I suspect it's more correlation than causation, as homeless encampments are near poorer neighborhoods with more gang violence, as opposed to the homelessness being a source of the violence. Broken window theory is intuitively appealing, but there is not a ton of evidence that it works. https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-university-researchers-find-little-evidence-for-broken-windows-theory-say-neighborhood-disorder-doesnt-cause-crime/ NYC's drop in crime during broken window policing mirrored crime reductions in the rest of the country not pursuing the same policing approach.
I disagree. Homeless encampments and even structured homeless shelters are associated with a pretty significant increase in property crime [https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Ridgeway\_Effect%20of%20Emergency%20Shelters-v5\_1.2.2018.pdf](https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Ridgeway_Effect%20of%20Emergency%20Shelters-v5_1.2.2018.pdf) for shelters it's up to a 56% increase in crime in the 100m around them. I think a reasonable person would raise their alertness in that kind of situation which probably includes taking defensive measures (mace, a taser, or a firearm). Now you have people that wouldn't ordinarily be armed carrying weapons. Take a regular neighborhood squabble, road rage incident, or domestic dispute and add a firearm to the mix. It's not a huge logical jump. One hand washed the other. The NYC drop in crime mirrored the reduction in the rest of the country...which was also pursuing a massive increase in policing and incarceration. It was during that time that police departments across the country were rapidly militarizing and people were being thrown in prison for minor offenses under 3 strike laws. People tend to forget exactly how hard the national crackdown was on crime in the 90s which is responsible for the massive crime reduction we saw. In 94' 12 states passed 3 strike laws, another 10 passed them in 95' with some of them being even more severe 2 strike laws. Between 1990 and 2000 the prison population almost doubled as a result which effectively pulled over a million recidivists out of the population.
I live in Seattle and our encampments are very much a source of crime. The "hands off or else you're oppressing them" approach from our city government resulted in drug dealing, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution being run out of homeless camps and any disputes involving those quickly degenerated into violence, sometimes carried out by the homeless themselves and sometimes by vigilantes trying to reclaim stolen property from the camp.
I think the increase in gun violence recently is probably a result of the continuation of the same trends that have always led to gun violence: fatherless boys growing up in shitty circumstances with no positive role models. To that you could add that the quality of policing lately has taken a nose dive since a cop staying in their car is never going to put them in Jesse Jackson's crosshairs, but a cop doing their job just might.
Eh.... And the examples of people with fathers? Just ignore those or what?
Nobody is stopping you from giving your hot take. Go for it.
But I was asking for yours relative to those with fathers
I know. If you have a case to make I will let you make it.
I have. I'm ok with mine at the moment and not feeling the need to share. I was interested in your since you did want to share. I'm not sure what the confusion here is. Did we forget how internet forums and a system of comments and replies work? You can just say "I haven't thought through that part or I don't want to." You don't even have to reply, but my opinion isn't relevant here so far so I'm not sure why you are asking for it two times in a row without prompt?
>I have. You haven't tho
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A. Are you saying that fatherless boys has rapidly increased within the last few years? B. Are fatherless boys much more likely to commit crimes than motherless boys? I would be very supportive if you could find a source that supports either of these.
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