> What's an alternative explanation?
Is that all it takes? Hey, Mr. Movie Critic, let's see you make a better movie!? Do I have to present an alternative explaination to stop people from endlessly coming to this conclusion:
>> So why is our murder rate so much higher than other countries, and
>> why do we love guns so much?
And we sure do love pizza!
Nonetheless, Andie thinks I 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.
I don't think this is a valid summary of what I wrote, so the rest of his paragraph speculating about having "more bad people per capita" is just an extension of that. As for my point about not looking in everyone's briefcase for the reason that the US leads the world in corporate crime, he seems willing to support me:
>> The answers to those are pretty obvious.
As for his professional interaction with murderers:
>> 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.
Which is to say: they aren't like "just about anybody" and for sure they aren't like your average gun owner in the US. This reminds me of the old Jack Handy "deep thought" ...
# "To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no # music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other"
He continues:
>> You may not be interested in this question, but it is
>> interested in you --
Just for reference, it's this question I think is uninteresting:
>> Nonetheless it is an interesting sociological
>> question why the per capita gun homicide rate
>> in this country is so high.
I continue to think that there are far more interesting sociological questions than this one, if only because there are MANY exceptional attributes about life in the US (suburbs! bad mass transit! weird government! two-faced dealings about children! weird christians!), and many of them have far more impact on me and those around me. But okay, whatever, I'll find it interesting for this afternoon only:
>> everyone else who thinks about guns worries about this
Hyperbole will get you everywhere! :-)
Actually, I guess I'd challenge you to find many people who "thinks about guns" very much. Maybe we travel in different circles, but I don't see very many people at all "thinking about guns" ...
>> and with 16,000 dead a year in this country, they are
>> right to worry about it.
I'm not saying that, as a policy goal, reducing violent crime and murder in particular is uninteresting. Except for blips around the early 80s and the early 90s (and despite large increases in population and gun ownership), I'm happy to report that violent crime is trending down in a big way. Go team. Don't forget, of course, that only about 70% of homicide is done with a firearm and more are done with knives than are done with non-handguns (which are about 50% of the total). So of this 16,000 about 8,000 are from handguns, which is what I think you mean when you say "gun" ...
But, no: I'm not in the slightest worried about being murdered by a gun, and neither should you. For instance, even though I live in Oakland, I'm not in a Latino Gang:
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_081012414.html
33% in a city that's a heavy-hitter in murder numbers, now that's a statistic that's significant.
>> You need a better answer than you have given, which is
>> none at all.
If you say so. I maintain that my main contribution so far is to object to the loose causal association between "we loves our guns" and murder. I've said many times here that I'm "anti-anti-gun" in the same way that I'm "anti-anti-abortion" and "anti-anti-gay-marriage" ... (for this you brand me a "big gun guy" -- so I guess to you I'm also a "big gay guy" and a "big abortion-getting guy") It's probably a much more interesting sociological question why otherwise reasonable people come to such startlingly outrageous conclusions. Anyway: here goes nothin.
I think the question of what drives murder in the US is pretty complex, mostly because it comes up in a bunch of discrete cases that aren't really related to each other; your stats show pretty clearly that things like guy-on-ex is something like 5% of murder, yet it gets a lot of attention. It should be clear from the even from differences in geography that there's a number of factors at work here, which is only one of the reasons it's so frustrating to see "well it must be the guns and the history" hokum.
The largest identifyable group of gun murders can be explained as extreme criminality: gangs, territory protection, revenge, other crimes gone wrong, etc. and the majority of those happen disproportionatly in cities. Almost half of murders in 2004 happened in a group of about 70 cities with populations over 250,000 with a total population of about 52M; half of that (about 20% of the total) was confined to 10 cities with populations of over 1M covering about 24M people. Rob banks because that's where the money is; find murders in the cities, because that's where extreme criminality occurs. Simple, really.
The extreme example of the extremes is of course Washington, DC with only 600k population and ~250 annual murders. And because of the strict hangun control laws there, _all_ of those gun murders were by other-than-law-abiding-gun-owners (the ones Doug says "loves" their guns) ...
Here's a little formula:
- Gun ownership causes violent crimes - Get rid of gun ownership - Violent crime sets records
What went wrong?
So, what causes (or allows) that extreme criminality?
I think a lot of root causes have been identified:
- Underground economies - Breakdown of social structures - Poverty and Desperation
Even if you take a step down from murder -- by far the smallest category of the major violent crimes -- firearms are only used in something like 10% of the broader category of aggravated assault. With so much violent crime occuring without firearms despite 'easy access' it really doesn't make any sense at all to say "we love our guns" in the same sentence as "we have a violent crime problem" ...
Here's a pleasant little story:
http://www.berkeleydaily.org/article.cfm?archiveDate=04-07-06&storyID=23846
On to who you know:
>> 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.
This is the exact opposite conclusion of everyone else (including the FBI). The deal is that if you know the person who killed you, it's likely that the investigation will find out who you knew and will likely clear the case. It's the ones where you DON'T know your attacker (or your relationship is distant enough that it's not available to the investigators) that don't get cleared.
>> 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.
What's so hard about it? Maybe you're just not trying. It's been shown clearly before that access to firearms doesn't "make" you a criminal. How many ways can it be shown? There are plenty of places that have higher rates of gun ownership with lower violent crime rates. Even in the US, gun ownership is on the rise while violent crime is in a 50 year downtrend.
And I'm a little sick of this "easy access" bullshit. I want each and every one of you who live in the US to go get a gun. Report back as soon as you have it, or tell us why you were unable to (NYC, DC and Chicago residents, you know who you are). Tell us how easy it was to get it. Live with it for a while, and tell us how easy that is, too (especially if you have children in your house). If you require a safe, locked cabinet to store it in, let us know how expensive and heavy it is, and what you had to do to install it in your house and convince yourself that it is safe and you are being responsible. If you live in a place that makes it "easy" to do so, get a permit to carry your firearm. Then carry it around with you for a while. Tell us how easy that is and especially how easy it is to make sure no one sees your firearm when you are required to have it concealed. Tell us about the places you visit that your permit isn't recognized, such as government buildings that you paid for. Tell us about places you visit where it wouldn't be easy to take it due to your clothing, like your gym. Take it out and hold it in your hand. Ask yourself: how confident do I feel should I have to use this? What will it take for me to gain and keep that confidence? How easy will that be for me? What do I know about what will happen should I decide to use this in the manner in which it was designed for use? How prepared am I to deal with the criminal and civil liability I might face should I decide to use a firearm in self-defense? What will it take for me to be prepared for that?
This is "easy access" ...?
You posted some interesting statistics. Stats are fun. Even more fun is decoding them and what they are trying to say; I like to look at charts and graphs. It's always interesting to get a feel for the numbers involved in a subject. Doug does too:
> we learn that gun owners are disproportionally white, male,
> Protestant, Republican, and Southern. Gosh, sometimes life
> just lives up to cliches, doesn't it?
I'm all for jokes about the cliches of gun owners. But we were talking about _violent criminals_ ... I don't think you can show that your (har, har) gun owning demographic above bears any resemblance to the demographic of gun criminals. But if you can, please share it with us.
-----
Wojtek writes:
> gun ownership does create potential for social interaction
> that alters individual consciousness and leads to violence.
Note of course that potential violence and actual violence are very different things (mostly!), and that gun-based violent crime is less than 3% of total violent crime. The leap from "has gun" to "is a violent criminal" is simply not substantiated, especially in places that have higher gun ownership and lower violent crime. But we repeat ourselves.
-----
Dennis asks:
> Why does the average gun owner own a gun?
Beats me. Why does the average 4WD vehicle owner buy a 4WD vehicle? You're about as likely to use 4WD as you are to use your gun given the wide discrepency between gun sales and participation in hunting, clubs, ranges, and other legal places to shoot. So what's the big deal? People buy guns for lots of reasons: imagined and real self-protection, hunting, sporting, insecurity, fetishes, mechanical fascination, no reason at all, whimsy.
Get over it.
/jordan