biffvernon wrote:A trouble with that chart is that it doesn't distinguish between hand-gun and hunting-rifle ownership. I guess the case of Iceland illustrates this neatly.
There is that among other things. Often they count suicides by gun as a gun death or even a homicide. http://americangunfacts.com/
Little John wrote:You are quite right. Gun ownership, by itself, does not directly correlate with a high murder rate. You also need a homicidal, f*cked-up culture with no capacity for humility or self-reflection.
The whole culture or population does not need to be off kilter, just a segment that deals with and consumes large amounts of illegal drugs.
Little John wrote:You are quite right. Gun ownership, by itself, does not directly correlate with a high murder rate. You also need a homicidal, f*cked-up culture with no capacity for humility or self-reflection.
The whole culture or population does not need to be off kilter, just a segment that deals with and consumes large amounts of illegal drugs.
Which segment would that be?
The segment that shoots each other and consumes large amounts of illegal drugs.
vtsnowedin wrote:
The whole culture or population does not need to be off kilter, just a segment that deals with and consumes large amounts of illegal drugs.
Which segment would that be?
The segment that shoots each other and consumes large amounts of illegal drugs.
If that segment is randomly distributed across the entire population, then it merely represents the outer extremes of an underlying dominant culture that inevitably breeds such outer extremes, In which case, my original point about such a culture being f*cked up still stands. The only way that point could be called into question is if V is trying to argue that a particular sub-cultural segment that is otherwise separate from the mainstream culture is responsible for the majority of gun crime. Of course, this would then itself require some sort of plausible explanation/debate for why such a separate sub-cultural phenomenon should exist. I am simply trying to get him to be clear about this. And, for that matter, you too. From that point we may then intellectually honestly proceed.
2008 (Jan-June) New York City Crime Statistics by Race (from Yahoo News)
-83% of all gun assailants were black, while making up 24% of the population
-Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98% of all gun assailants
-49 of every 50 muggings and murders were carried out by blacks or Hispanics
-Blacks and Hispanics commit 96% of the crimes in New York, but include only 85% of those stopped during ‘stop and frisk’ incidents.
Does that clear it up for you?
Yes thanks V. I have a few things to say in response, but am a wee bit busy right at the moment and so will get back to you sometime in the next day or so
The statistics aren't quite as bad in the UK but the Met Police a few years ago set up, at the behest of the black community, a gun crime unit, Operation Trident, to deal with black on black shootings in London mainly associated with the drug gang culture.
I think it is fairly global that the illegal drug trade attracts violent criminals who think little of using firearms to shoot each other. I would make a significant bet that the proportion of firearm homicide victims in UK and many other countries that are drug gang victims is a far higher part of the total than in the US.
PS_RalphW wrote:I think it is fairly global that the illegal drug trade attracts violent criminals who think little of using firearms to shoot each other. I would make a significant bet that the proportion of firearm homicide victims in UK and many other countries that are drug gang victims is a far higher part of the total than in the US.
I don't know as I would go that far. The percentage of crime in the US that is drug related is quite high.
I would expect crime rates of all types to rise in the UK as the numbers of immigrants increase. If you ban all knives over three inches long they will get very good at doing things with a two and a half inch blade.
It is already illegal to carry a knife in a public place with a blade longer than 3 inches in the UK and the government has been considering making a 1 year prison term the automatic punishment.
(Of course it is perfectly legal to buy large knives in a high street shop, which begs the question how are you supposed to get your purchase home? )
The theory was IIRC that a knife needs to be 3 inches long to inflict a fatal stab wound to the heart of an adult human.
The correlation between crime rates and immigrants of particular nationalities is a highly contentious subject in the UK, with the right exaggerating the impact and the left (probably) down playing it. Official figures are hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence is all over the MSM. However, I don't see where immigrants come into this discussion.
Japan has very low gun crime largely because their criminal class have a long tradition of assassination using knives.
Compared to most European nations, the US is very authoritarian when it comes to drug use (other than CH3CH2OH and nicotine, and then only if the government gets it's cut) and this has done squat to cut drug consumption over the last 50+ years, whilst making tidy profits for the privately run jails.
In countries where (soft) drugs are widely tolerated, drug related crime is much lower, as the profit motive is removed for the violent gangs. Of course hard drugs need to be curtailed, but getting the balance right is difficult and easily perverted by the profit motive on each side of the argument.
The bottom line is that violent people will do violent things with the tools to hand. The better the tools, the more efficient the propagation of that violence before they are apprehended.
Catweazle wrote:
I resisted the temptation to mention race, because some people will immediately fly off the handle and shout "racism", regardless of the facts.
I made the mistake some years ago of quoting figures for intelligence versus race and I didn't like some of the replies.
That is why I was being a bit obtuse and letting people read between the lines. It might well be that the root cause is the lack of opportunities some races face as well as lower quality education that their children actually receive is the problem but repeated efforts to correct that has yielded few results.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
