Unpossible
A lot of shootings in NY lately. The NY Daily News has been calling it a gun plague. A gun plague? No way. Carrying guns there is illegal. It’s easier to call it a gun plague than, you know, a black teenager plague. Which we can’t talk about. Because we’d be racist. Also why we can’t talk about Sudden Jihdad Syndrome.
Even better than blaming guns. Blame chicken. Maybe it’s a chicken plague?
In comments, Guav:
Lots of unpossibles here in just the last two months:
Bronx Girl, 15, Shot In Head By Stray Bullet
Teen Pulls BB Gun On Cops, Gets Shot In The Face
Drive-By Shooting On Lorimer Street In Brooklyn
Bronx Student Shot Outside High School
Brooklyn Teen Fatally Shot Outside Brownsville High School
Stray Bullet Kills 92-Year-Old Bronx Woman In Her Home, Teen Arrested
Teen Shot Dead In Flatbush Coffee Shop
13-Year-Old Queens Boy Fatally Shot in After-School Fight
Bronx Mom Killed In Afternoon Gang Shootout
Brooklyn Drive-By Shooting Leaves 2 Dead, 1 WoundedMaybe instead of banning guns, Bloomberg should just ban Brooklyn and the Bronx. Or teenagers.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Lots of unpossibles here in just the last two months:
Bronx Girl, 15, Shot In Head By Stray Bullet
Teen Pulls BB Gun On Cops, Gets Shot In The Face
Drive-By Shooting On Lorimer Street In Brooklyn
Bronx Student Shot Outside High School
Brooklyn Teen Fatally Shot Outside Brownsville High School
Stray Bullet Kills 92-Year-Old Bronx Woman In Her Home, Teen Arrested
Teen Shot Dead In Flatbush Coffee Shop
13-Year-Old Queens Boy Fatally Shot in After-School Fight
Bronx Mom Killed In Afternoon Gang Shootout
Brooklyn Drive-By Shooting Leaves 2 Dead, 1 Wounded
Maybe instead of banning guns, Bloomberg should just ban Brooklyn and the Bronx. Or teenagers.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Well, if more laws are all it would take to get rid of this “plague”, why haven’t they gotten on the ball and made H1N1 illegal? I’m sure it would be just as effective.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
I’m curious as to how you know the shooters were all black teens.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I’ll lay 5:1 in each case.
Oh, and it’s based on description in press accounts too. If it’s a white guy, press will generally say ‘white male’.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
In several of those articles, though, there is no information about the shooter at all. What’s more, NYC is a fairly diverse place. We have people that are neither black nor white. So I’m wondering how you eliminated those people too.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Brutal Hugger, there are many ways to come to that conclusion. One is being aware of the demographics of the neighborhoods within which these crimes occurred and making an educated guess—they are predominantly black neighborhoods, not a lot of white Bloods or Bangladeshi Crips in these black neighborhoods. Add that to the fact that almost all of the victims are black themselves (homicide is usually segregated. Nationally, 86% of white victims are killed by whites and 94% of black victims are killed by blacks). Sometimes you can rely on eyewitness accounts. Sometimes you just make a wild guess when the shooters are named Carvett Gentles, Rohan Francis, Cleve Smith, Clivie Smith, and Dwayne Taylor—who were shooting at someone named Tyrone Creighton. And sometimes you don’t have to guess, because you can look at a picture of the person who admitted they did it.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I wouldn’t consider them eliminated. However, based on crime stats regarding who victims generally are and who their attackers usually are; and the demographics of those areas, I’m going with the odds.
And it’s funny you should mention it because I was just having a conversation about this post with someone in the area. We both noted how, generally, press descriptions lack mention of race if it’s one particular race and not if it’s others.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Yes, NYC is a fairly diverse place. But our criminals aren’t.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Looks like the person I was talking to chimed in.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
So yes, I suppose there is a slim possibility that one of these shootings could have been committed by an elderly Asian woman, but the chances are it wasn’t. Because elderly Asian women simply do not commit the majority of the street crime in NYC.
November 19th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Breaking news—From what I can discern from these photos of Carvett, Rohan, Dwayne, Clivie and Cleve, they are not white, Asian, Indian or Hispanic. I guess you really can tell a lot from a name sometimes.
They have a history of 34 prior arrests between them for weapons possession, harassment, grand larceny, burglary, assault, endangering the welfare of a child, menacing, drug possession and sale, gang assault and robbery.
But it’s gun problem we’re having here …
November 20th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
In reply to Ray, whose comment appears to have been eaten by Uncle’s server meltdown last night, which said that the homicide rates correlated just as strongly with economics as with race, but that we mention race and not economics because it’s “not as fun,” I say this:
I used to think that Ray, but I come to think that less and less—although poverty undoubtedly has an effect, I don’t think it’s as strong a factor as culture, which is what I believe drives the disproportionate homicide rates we see with young black men (not their race). You don’t see such disparate crimes rates among other similarly poor demographics.
In Chinatown you have dozens of poor immigrants crammed into tiny illegally subdivided tenements, yet for some reason the Chinese are not randomly shooting each other in the streets. Because that is not popular in their culture. Blacks and Hispanics are each about 27% of the city’s population, have similar rates of poverty and similar unemployment rates, but not similar homicide rates: Hispanics are 27% of homicide victims and 29% of homicide perpetrators—even with their proportion of the population—but blacks are 61% of homicide perpetrators and victims.
92% of homicides in NYC are perpetrated by males. 68% of them are between the ages of 18-34. If it was simply poverty-driven, why aren’t women doing it? Or older people? These aren’t crimes of desperation we’re talking about—we’re not talking about robbing people to put food on the table, we’re talking about wildly shooting into a crowd of people over something totally unimportant and inconsequential. It’s stupid street bullshit, glorified and perpetuated by hip hop thug culture.
Nobody here is saying that race is the cause of the homicide rates. But the homicide rate among young black men is completely disproportionate from their percent of the population, and simply blaming it on economics isn’t telling the whole story.
Brutal Hugger – Jason Whitlock, discussing what he calls the Black KKK: