--- jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com wrote:
> > To what do you attribute the high firearm-driven
> > murder rate in this country, then?
>
> Oh, so I'm the Sociologist now? :)
Well, you have a theory. It's that the explanation for the high US murder rate is that murder is due to the murderers being bad people who have a propensity to violence. Apart from the fact that is is doubtful for reasons set out below, there are other problems. Does the US have an unusually high proportion of bad people per capita? Canada, Switzerland, other gun-owning nations have much lower murder rates. Are their citizens just better people on average than we Americans? What explains why all these bad people are here -- did we get the "wretched refuse of [their] teeming shores"? Did an unusually high percentage of the violence-prone emigrate hither? Or were they brought here forcibly via the Middle Passage? (Given the high rate of African-American violent offenders.)
Actually, I think my idea is more plausible that the high rate of murders and other violent crime in the US is due to a combination of poverty and hopelessness, John Wayne culture, and easy access to firearms.
As I have said, I don't take this to be a call to ban firearms; the liberals have lost that battle. I think they should be pro-right-to-bear-arms, though this will be a hard sell in minority communities. But we have to face the facts and adopt the most plausible theory of the high rate of gun violence, and not sweep it under the rug. I think the best point of attack for reducing violent crime is reducing poverty and hopelessness -- i think that is why Canadians and the Swiss can be armed to the teeth without killing each other (too much).
>
> The US leads the world in plenty of other kinds of
> crime -- say, "corporate crime" or maybe even
> "international war crimes" -- and no one goes
> looking into the briefcases of 150+ Million people
> for the "obvious" answers.
The answers to those are pretty obvious. With respect to corporate crime, we have a vast, comparatively unregulated economy with an upper class that has a low sense of ethics and a high sense of entitlement. I am not sure that per capita the US is worse in white collar crime than many advanced industrial countries. I don't know the comparative figures, but Japanese business seems pretty crooked. And England, since Thatcher.
War crimes is easy too, given that the US is the world's only imperial superpower. We have the motive, opportunity, and ability. (And self-righteousness.) Serbs and Kosovans and Russians (in Chechnya) and Chechens (in Chechnya and Russia) committed a lot of war crimes when they could, but their reach was limited.
>
> So maybe I'll start with what I don't attribute it
> to:
>
> - Fantastically large numbers of gun owners
> 5-or-6-sigmas worth who will never commit a
> violent crime
> - Fantastically large numbers of guns
> 6-or-7-sigmas worth which will never be used in a
> violent crime
>
> The question people should be asking is: if
> everything I think about guns and violence is true,
> why isn't the US _totally fucking awash_ in murder,
> like on the order of 1:100/yr rather than
> 1:100,000/year?
>
> > Mind you, I'm not speaking from an anti-gun agenda
>
> I wish you were speaking from an "I'm an attorney
> who has seen what violent criminals are, and they
> aren't like you and me or the vast majority of the
> nearly 300 MILLION people in the US;
I don't think this is true. Most of my murderers are pretty much just like anybody, they've just gotten mixed up with the wrong people, are subject to bad social pressures, and made foolish mistake or lost control for a bad minute. This is what you'd expect given the Milgram experiment.
and
> incidentally, the average gun owner with the average
> gun IS like you and me" ... because none of this is
> "about" guns, or "about" an "anti-gun agenda" --
> it's about violent crime. And yes, the US is awash
> in violent crime: the headline of this thread even
> says it's up (though quite a bit lower than it was
> 40 years ago)! And a very small part of it is
> homicide, and about half of that is murder, and
> about 2/3 of that very small number is gun murder.
But that's still 16,000 murders a year or so, and way off the scale for murders per capita in other advanced countries. Probably for other violent crime, though and I have not looked that up.
>
> But it's the thing that everyone points to, and they
> sometimes even pronounce it to be Sociology. Well,
> fooey.
Why fooey?
>
> > Nonetheless it is an interesting sociological
> question
> > why the per capita gun homicide rate in this
> country
> > is so high.
>
> I don't think it's an interesting question of any
> sort; it seems to me that it's merely a footnote in
> the question about violent crime. Which is where
> this thread started but (as usual) couldn't stay.
Well, I normally say, OK, you're interested in what you're interested in, but in your case, given that you're a big gun guy, this is one you can't blow off. You may not be interested in this question, but it is interested in you -- everyone else who thinks about guns worries about this, and with 16,000 dead a year in this country, they are right to worry about it. You need a better answer than you have given, which is none at all.
>
> > On the other hand, probably most murders involve
> domestic
> > conflicts and the household revolver or automatic
> > pistol, in which case it might as well be a Colt
> .45
> > Peacemaker circa 1880.
>
> Why do you say 'probably' ...? Most murder in the
> US happens during the commission of a violent crime.
> By violent criminals.
As of about a decade ago, about half the murders where committed by "strangers," now it's about 45%; but that is misleading, because it really means relationship unknown. Where the relationship is known almost 80% were acquaintances. It's reasonable to extrapolate that a very high percentage of the cases here the relationship is unknown, the victims know the murderers.
The following right-wing, pro-gun link suggests that a great many murderers are committed by people with _drug_ records (not necessarily records of violent drums), and often under the influence:
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvmurd.html
>
> Well, I don't know a lot about 'interesting
> sociological questions' but I know that there are a
> lot of drunk idiot relationships in the US tonight
> that have guns nearby that will result in two
> hangovers and another round tomorrow night and zero
> gun play.
Of course, but just because most quarrels involving intoxicated individuals (with or without criminal records) who have easy access to guns won't result in murder doesn't mean that a high rate of gun ownership doesn't contribute to the US's off-the chart per capita murder rate.
>
> It's absurd to believe that access to a gun makes
> you a criminal or induces criminality any more than
> having access to a TV makes you a pornographer.
Straw man. No one said that. Having a gun doesn't make you a criminal, unless it's illegal -- you're a felon in possession, no registration if required, etc.
It certainly doesn't make you a murderer. But given out high gun violence rate, it is hard to believe that access ti guns doesn't causally contribute to making murderers into murderers.
OK, here's some data:
* * *
FBI Uniform Crime Reporting 2003 The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program's annual publication, Crime in the United States, 2003, compiles crime statistics from more than 17,000 city, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies. Here is a summary of the murder and manslaughter statistics for 2003:
The UCR Program estimated that 16,503 murders occurred in the United States in 2003. This figure represents a 1.7-percent increase from the 2002 estimate.
Law enforcement agencies provided the UCR Program with supplementary data for 14,408 murders in 2003. These data showed that most murder victims (90.6 percent) were adults and most were males (77.6 percent). Of the male murder victims, 8.2 percent were juveniles (persons under the age of 18). Juvenile females comprised 13.5 percent of female murder victims nationwide. Sponsored Links Crime Reports Find Crime Reports & Countless FBI Files Using our Online Database! www.lnvestigator.com
Criminal Record Access By race, 48.7 percent of murder victims were white, 48.5 percent were black, and the remainder were of other races.
In 44.5 percent of murders, the relationship of the murder victim to the offender was unknown. Of the 55.5 percent of murders in which the victim/offender relationship was known, 77.6 percent of the victims knew their assailants.
In those murders for which law enforcement personnel reported victim and offender relationship data, 32.3 percent of females were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and 2.5 percent of males were killed by their wives or girlfriends.
Of the murders involving a single victim and a single offender, 92.4 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders; 84.7 percent of white victims were killed by white offenders.
Of the murders in 2003 for which law enforcement identified the type of weapon, nearly 71 percent (70.9) involved firearms. Offenders used knives or cutting instruments in 13.4 percent of murders; personal weapons such as hands, fists, and feet in 7.0 percent of murders; and blunt objects in 4.8 percent of murders. Four percent of murders were committed with other types of weapons.
In 2003, law enforcement investigation was unable to determine the circumstance in 33.9 percent of murders in the Nation. The supplementary data also showed that more than 16 percent (16.4) of murders were committed during the commission of another felony such as during a robbery or a violation of a narcotic drug law.
People make the mistake of
> hearing that many murderers know their victim and
> think it must be two drunk idiots -- one of which
> would be alive today, the other of which wouldn't be
> in prison today -- if there just wasn't a gun in the
> house.
* * **
In domestic disputes involving men and women: (ex-) hubby or boyfriend gets jealous, maybe drunk, and blows the little lady away, sometimes the reverse, mostly guy on gal stuff:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/vbi.txt
According to the FBI's Crime in the U.S (1994), 22,540 murders were committed nationwide in 1992. (So murders are down considerable over the last decade).
The relationship between the victims and the offender was known in 61% of these murders and unknown in 39%. About 15% of the murders where the relationship between the victim and the assailant was known involved a victim described in police records as an intimate spouse, ex-spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend) of the killer. (See methodological note for further information about these data.)
Of those murders where the relationship between the victim and the killer was known, about 10% involved the killing of a spouse or ex-spouse and nearly 6% involved the killing of a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Females are more likely than males to be victims of violence by intimates Annually, compared to males, females experienced over 10 times as many incidents of violence by an intimate. On average each year, women experienced over 572,000 violent victimizations committed by an intimate, compared to approximately 49,000 incidents committed against men.
Average annual number of single-offender violent victimizations, 1987-91
Sex of victim Victim-offender ------------------- relationship Female Male
Intimate 572,032 48,983 Other relative 117,201 75,587 Acquaintance 796,067 1,268,506 Stranger 71,114 1,182,307
* * * *>
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