>firearms killings _are_ a pattern, if I recall correctly they are something between 5 and 10 times more frequent in US than other first wold countries.
I personally believe that US citizens are unable to understand how dumb their attitude to weapons is,
You can't compare crime rates without controlling for other differences. Most other first world countries are much more ethnically homogenous than the U.S.
And they don't suffer from the cultural problems caused by the fairly recent institutional persecution of an entire class of people.
It's not very PC to talk about, and I think that the high incidence of crime amongst black Americans is directly caused by the decades of persecution they suffered which causes them to occupy a lower socio-economic position on average than whites, not any inherent racial differences.
But whatever the reason, whites and blacks both have similar access to guns and similar gun ownership rates, yet if you only count white americans, you'll find a fairly similar gun crime rate to the rest of the first World, so clearly, easy access to guns isn't the problem.
The closest country I can think of to our situation is South Africa (Rights recently restored to an historical lower class. Though it's still not a great comparison because of their relatively lower GDP per capital, and different demographics). Their gun violence rate is about 5 times that of the US.
Offhand, do you know of any material that delves deeper into that taboo topic? Sociologically I find it really interesting but like you said, it's not a popular subject.
You can check the DOJ for statistics, but I've found it incredibly hard to find any unbiased analysis.
I was interested in the topic after I saw a DOJ chart that listed crime by race. I had to research myself to find anything really useful, and by research I just mean taking data from DOJ statistics.
The thing is, it's like we live in 2 separate countries, if you're white or asian, America is almost as safe as other first world countries. If you're Black or Hispanic it's much, much more dangerous.
Black Americans are 2 to 3 times more likely to live below the poverty line than white Americans, and the median white household makes about 1.5 times more money than the median black household.
But black Americans are about 8 times more likely to commit a violent crime, and about 6 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime.
I've seen some statistics that show at least a portion could be accounted for by controlling for the increased percentage of black single mothers.
Thanks for the answer, yes, there are many factors to take into account, but ascribing the high homicide rate only to racial diversity seems reductive.
Consider this data[0], in the context of Europe: UK[1] has likely more racial diversity than Denmark and Latvia, but firearm homicides/100k people is lower (0.1 vs 0.3 and 0.2, US has 3.0 ).
I imagine that "black poor/uneducated/mistreated people are responsible for most killings", is actually the same as saying "poor/uneducated/mistreated people are responsible for most killing", it just so happens that (at this point in time) in the US this poor are black, while in other countries the social segregation goes around different lines (e.g. gipsies in eastern europe).
Decades of persecution may or may not matter, but those also seem a minor issue, as most countries have had high criminality among poor/uneducated/mistreated people before (e.g. italian immigrants in US beginning of 1900, "wops") even without a history of repression.
>but ascribing the high homicide rate only to racial diversity seems reductive.
I'm not ascribing it to racial diversity. I'll elaborate a bit on exactly what I mean--I'm ascribing it to a particular cultural mix that is in part uniquely derived from the New World's history with slavery.
>n the US this poor are black, while in other countries the social segregation goes around different lines (e.g. gipsies in eastern europe).
That's not comparable, Gypsies do not make up anywhere near the percent of the population in Europe that black americans do in the US (also according to wikipedia we have have more Gypsies in the US than the vast majority of European countries).
>is actually the same as saying "poor/uneducated/mistreated people are responsible for most killing"
That's not correct. If it were that simple, once you adjusted for education and income, you would expect to find similar crime rates between blacks and whites, and nearly identical crime rates between blacks and other minorities. But that isn't the case, a poor uneducated black person is still many times more likely to commit a crime than any other poor uneducated race/ethnicity in the US.
Yes there have been plenty of cases of discrimination against minorities and increased criminality amongst minorities, but there are two factors here which seem to be fairly unique.
1. Descended from slaves. There is no other first world country where 13% of it's population is recently descended from slaves, forcibly moved there. In fact if you'll look at every other country in world that does have a large percentage of slave descendants, you'll find an incredibly high crime rate.
If you look at the top 20 countries by intentional homicide rate[0], you'll note that all but South Africa are in the New World, and have some recent(last 200 years) history of slavery.
2. No other first world country has had such a large single monolithic underclass for nearly its entire history. Underclasses come and go as immigrants assimilate. That hasn't been the case in the us with this one particular group.
In the end what I'm arguing is that you can't compare the U.S. to Europe, there are just too many differences to take into account. Take 2 separate groups in the US--blacks and whites--adjust for income--and you'll find that whites, even poor uneducated ones, have a similar homicide rate to other first world countries. Therefore gun ownership/access is not what causes our high homicide rate.
I would argue that if you banned guns tomorrow, and every law abiding citizen in the US decided to march down to the police station and turn in his gun, we would still have a murder rate much higher than nearly every country in Europe.
However...
>firearms killings _are_ a pattern, if I recall correctly they are something between 5 and 10 times more frequent in US than other first wold countries. I personally believe that US citizens are unable to understand how dumb their attitude to weapons is,
You can't compare crime rates without controlling for other differences. Most other first world countries are much more ethnically homogenous than the U.S.
And they don't suffer from the cultural problems caused by the fairly recent institutional persecution of an entire class of people.
It's not very PC to talk about, and I think that the high incidence of crime amongst black Americans is directly caused by the decades of persecution they suffered which causes them to occupy a lower socio-economic position on average than whites, not any inherent racial differences.
But whatever the reason, whites and blacks both have similar access to guns and similar gun ownership rates, yet if you only count white americans, you'll find a fairly similar gun crime rate to the rest of the first World, so clearly, easy access to guns isn't the problem.
The closest country I can think of to our situation is South Africa (Rights recently restored to an historical lower class. Though it's still not a great comparison because of their relatively lower GDP per capital, and different demographics). Their gun violence rate is about 5 times that of the US.