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?
Yes, you do.
>
> And we sure do love pizza!
This trivializes the 16,000 murders a year we have in this country. That's not liking 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,
Of course it is. Of my murderers, you say:
> 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.
But if your theory isn't that the murder rate is so high because )for whatever reason) we have a lot of Bad Violent people who are Not Like Us, what are you saying?
>
> 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.
Look, they are more or less just like us. Hence my reference to the Milgram experiment. That study showed that with mild pressure from authority -- no threats, just mild pressure -- you could turn almost anyone into a torturer. Now, there are murderers who are Not Like Us, psychs like John Wayne Gacey, for example. But I really do think most of them are just Like Us. They;re not Bad People. They're people who, often in a moment of intoxication or panoc or loss of self control or succumbing to social pressure, do bad things. I don't think that's an excuse and it doesn't mean thery shouldn'y be punished. But you delude yourself if you think they're a different species, Jack Katz's Bad People who suuccumb to the Seductions of Evil. There are people like that, but my murderers are just people. People like us. Hypocrite lectuer, mon semamble, mon frere.
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"
Sure, the murderers commit murder. That's an important difference, deserving many decades in prison. That does not mean that they're Different. They are like you, sorry, chum, like me, yes indeed/ We're not Beter than most of them. We're just luckier in our circumstances.
To make the point a different way. I can take a nice eighteen year old kid who wouldn't harm a fly and in nine months turn him into a thug who will kill babies and sing songs about how much fun it is. That's what boot camp is for. The Marines who commited those crimes, the ARmy torturers at Abu Graib, are not Bad People, and they aren't that different from from us. They just succummbed to the pressure of circumtsances.
>
> 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.
Well, I say again, you need an answer to it, because your critics and many others (including me) think it is interesting and important. In fact, not only do you need a theory to explain the question, you need an account of why you think it is uninteresting, because lack of interest in that quesyion makes you seem callous.
>
> I continue to think that there are far more
> interesting sociological
> questions than this one,
Yeah, but this is an important 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!),
Jesus, you _are_ callous.
and
> many of them have far more impact on me and those
> around me.
And fuck the 16,000 murdfer victims and their families and friends?
> >> everyone else who thinks about guns worries about
> this
>
> Hyperbole will get you everywhere! :-)
And this is hyperpole because you're the exception who cares more about two faced dealings with kids than with killings?
>
> Actually, I guess I'd challenge you to find many
> people who "thinks
> about guns" very much.
Sigh. Most people don't think about much. But I didn't say, Everything cares about this. I said everyone who thinks abiut guns (except you) thinks about this.
> I'm not saying that, as a policy goal, reducing
> violent crime and murder
> in particular is uninteresting.
That's thoughtful and kind of you.
I'm happy to report that violent crime
> is trending down in a
> big way. Go team.
This is encouraging, but your callousness us showing again.
So of this
> 16,000 about 8,000 are from handguns, which is what
> I think you mean
> when you say "gun" ...
So, you read my mind? No, it's not what I meant. I specifically used the term "firearms" to be inclusive.
>
> But, no: I'm not in the slightest worried about
> being murdered by a gun,
> and neither should you.
Nor am I, but but what is this relevant to? I am also not really worried about ending up living in a cardboard box under East Wacker Drive. Does that mean I shouldn't care about homelessness?
> If you say so. I maintain that my main contribution
Is that what you call it?
> so far is to object
> to the loose causal association between "we loves
> our guns" and murder.
I claimed that that widespread firearm ownership and access was an important causal factor in murder -- this is obvious, since the other causal factors won't flash to killing so easily without firearms.
> I think the question of what drives murder in the US
> is pretty complex,
Agreed, that's part of why it is interesting as well as important.
> mostly because it comes up in a bunch of discrete
> cases that aren't
> really related to each other;
This is less clear, considering how murder in particular and violent crime in general is more localized in certain socioeconomic strata.
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.
Did I say that?
>
> The largest identifyable group of gun murders can be
> explained as
> extreme criminality:
I don't see where you get this froim the statistics.
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.
ANother way to read this is that most murders occur where there are most people, and notably where there are large concentrations of poor people. Most of whom are not "extreme criminals," gangbangers or anything of the sort.
Rob banks
> because that's where the money is; find murders in
> the cities, because
> that's where extreme criminality occurs. Simple,
> really.
Ass-backwards, really. Why not read it my way: the murders happen where the people are?
>
> Here's a little formula:
>
> - Gun ownership causes violent crimes
> - Get rid of gun ownership
> - Violent crime sets records
But I never said I wanted to get rid of gun ownership. I said keep your guns, fine. I think that we should experiment with trying to reduce the rate of violent crime not by getting rid of guns, which won't happen in this country, or by locking up more people for longer, which probably accounts for a lot of the reduction in the rate of violent crime, but by eliminating poverty and desperations. If that doesn't lower the murder rate, it will at least have had the benefit of having accomplished something that was independently good.
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