We have been saying all along that the credentialed media have been ignoring the soaring homicide rates in our major cities.
Well, it took the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder to focus their attention, but it looks like The Washington Post finally got around to noticing as well:
By Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler | March 23, 2021 | 11:42 PM EDT
Until two lethal rampages this month, mass shootings had largely been absent from headlines during the coronavirus pandemic. But people were still dying — at a record rate.
In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.
The vast majority of these tragedies happen far from the glare of the national spotlight, unfolding instead in homes or on city streets and — like the covid-19 crisis — disproportionately affecting communities of color.
Last week’s shootings at spas in the Atlanta area and Monday’s shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killed a combined 18 people and rejuvenated a national effort to overhaul gun laws. But high-profile mass shootings such as those tend to overshadow the instances of everyday violence that account for most gun deaths, potentially clouding some people’s understanding of the problem and complicating the country’s response, experts say.
OK, they are starting to identify the problem. A bit further down:
“More than 100 Americans are killed daily by gun violence,” Ronnie Dunn, a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, said, using a figure that includes suicides. “The majority are in Black and Brown communities. We don’t really focus on gun violence until we have these mass shootings, but it’s an ongoing, chronic problem that affects a significant portion of our society.”
Of course, the article and the interviewees are all using the currently politically correct phrase, “gun violence,” as though firearms just pick themselves off the shelf and start shooting people. No one seems to be willing to point out that these shootings are being done by bad people!
Dr Dunn noted that the majority of these homicides “are in Black and Brown communities,” but seems quite unwilling to note that while the majority of victims “are in Black and Brown communities,” it is also true that the majority of their killers are part of the “black and brown communities.“
Overall, most homicides in the United States are intraracial, and the rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black killings are similar, both long term and in individual years.
Between 1980-2008, the U.S. Department of Justice found that 84% of white victims were killed by white offenders and 93% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.
In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 81% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 89% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.
In 2017, the FBI reported almost identical figures — 80% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 88% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.
Back to the Post. Dr Dunn, as you might expect, tried to place the blame on the increased killings on all sorts of things, including increased gun sales:
Researchers say the pandemic probably fueled the increases in several ways. The spread of the coronavirus hampered anti-crime efforts, and the attendant shutdowns compounded unemployment and stress at a time when schools and other community programs were closed or online. They also note the apparent collapse of public confidence in law enforcement that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Covid-19 and the protests over police brutality also led to a surge of firearm sales. In 2020, people purchased about 23 million guns, a 64 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.
Dunn pointed to this flood of firearms as the most detrimental factor in the fight to curb gun violence. When shootings become “the soundscape of inner-city neighborhoods,” he said, “it increases anxiety and stress and creates toxic stress.” Dunn compared the effect to post-traumatic stress disorder akin to what war veterans experience.
What didn’t you see in that? You didn’t see Dr Dunn point to any research which shows that the legally-purchased firearms surge, as a result of the #BlackLivesMatter “Mostly Peaceful Protests™” were at all related to the killings in our inner cities.
When riots and violence are spreading through our cities, and the images and news of that are being purveyed over the network and cable news day in and day out, it’s perfectly natural that some people would believe that they needed additional protection; that’s why gun sales increased. Dr Dunn wants you to believe that it why homicides spiked, but offers no proof that those increased gun sales had anything to do with it.
Have the police linked any of these additional forearms sales to the increased homicide rates? If they have, I’ve managed to miss that story.
One recent study, from the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, called gun violence “a public health crisis decades in the making.” An analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Black males between the ages of 15 and 34 accounted for 37 percent of gun homicides, even though they made up 2 percent of the U.S. population — a rate 20 times that of White males of the same age.
Here Dr Dunn provides the test. If black males between 15 and 34 account for 37% of homicides by firearm, while making up just 2% of the population, if the increased firearms sales have significantly contributed to the increased homicide rate, then we should see a heavy predominance of black males in that age group making up the increase in applications to purchase a firearm legally. Such would, if perhaps not prove what Dr Dunn is saying, at least provide a strong inference of it.
On average, there was one mass shooting every 73 days in 2020, compared with one every 36 days in 2019 and one every 45 days in 2017 and 2018. The slowdown interrupted what had been a five-year trend of more frequent and more deadly mass shootings.
That gun violence increased overall even as mass shootings declined underscores the fact that those high-profile events account for a relatively small share of firearm deaths. It should draw more attention to the victims and survivors of gun violence across the country, (Mark Barden, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise) said.
So, while homicides have increased, mass shooting events have decreased. It’s almost as though the random events of nuts going off and committing these high-profile crimes has nothing to do with the increased homicide rate.
But, of course, it’s the mass shootings which make the news, because, let’s face it: a couple of gang-bangers getting killed in Philadelphia isn’t even news anymore.
If black males between 15 and 34 are the victims of homicide at a rate twenty times that of white males of the same age, then we need to ask why that is, but one thing is certain: it’s not guns. There is something different in the education, culture and experiences of white and black males that is causing black males of those ages to kill each other at such rates, and until we start asking what those differences are, we will never honestly address the issue.
But in our age of political correctness, we cannot ask the questions, without being accused of being the world’s most horrible racist, an accusation which shuts down the questions, and shutting down the questions means shutting off all hope of coming up with the right answers.
Me? I’m less than a month from my 68th birthday, and I’m retired. I have no job from which I can be fired for asking politically incorrect questions, have nothing from which I can be #canceled. I can ask the uncomfortable questions, when no one else seems to be willing or able to do so.
But if other people don’t step up, if other people won’t ask the right questions, we might as well face it: we’ll never have the right answers. But, sadly enough, our friends on the left already know that. They have had the choice between asking the right questions, and hoping to find the right answers, or ignoring the right questions, because by doing that they risk far less for themselves, and the only real price for that is more dead black people on the streets of Washington and Chicago and Philadelphia.
We know what choice they have taken.
