As I’ve written before, murder is a poor metric to use when discussing violence, as the difference between a murder and a survivable attack depends on things as different as EMT & Trauma ER services to victim/shooter relationships.
A gang driveby might be more survivable than your spouse putting two in your head while you sleep, for example. And a gang execution might be less survivable than a mugging.
What are the total violent crime rates broken down by demographics? That tells a story more closely related to reality, although the people involved with this report have no interest in that.
I’d thought that as well, but if it were survivability we’d see corresponding increases in agg assaults with firearms as murder rates decrease. Last I looked they weren’t there, at least not to a degree to justify not using murder rate trends for longitudinal research. The total violent crime rate is almost too big as the motives vary so widely.
Regardless, this is actually a good article as it makes clear that the gun controller’s overly simplistic “gun availability” can’t be the primary factor in crime rates. Guns are in theory equally hard to get illegally in Chicago, yet the violence is not evenly distributed. Furthermore the places with the most “legal” ones have the lowest crime rates.
And I always like articles that reference just how concentrated violence is among a sub-minority of people in any given place. The association data points up a persistent small sub-culture of violence distinct from mere poverty of the lefty cause du jour.
July 26th, 2016 at 8:20 am
As I’ve written before, murder is a poor metric to use when discussing violence, as the difference between a murder and a survivable attack depends on things as different as EMT & Trauma ER services to victim/shooter relationships.
A gang driveby might be more survivable than your spouse putting two in your head while you sleep, for example. And a gang execution might be less survivable than a mugging.
What are the total violent crime rates broken down by demographics? That tells a story more closely related to reality, although the people involved with this report have no interest in that.
July 26th, 2016 at 11:54 am
And now for something completely different.
http://imgur.com/gallery/wUBqT
July 26th, 2016 at 3:39 pm
mikee,
I’d thought that as well, but if it were survivability we’d see corresponding increases in agg assaults with firearms as murder rates decrease. Last I looked they weren’t there, at least not to a degree to justify not using murder rate trends for longitudinal research. The total violent crime rate is almost too big as the motives vary so widely.
Regardless, this is actually a good article as it makes clear that the gun controller’s overly simplistic “gun availability” can’t be the primary factor in crime rates. Guns are in theory equally hard to get illegally in Chicago, yet the violence is not evenly distributed. Furthermore the places with the most “legal” ones have the lowest crime rates.
And I always like articles that reference just how concentrated violence is among a sub-minority of people in any given place. The association data points up a persistent small sub-culture of violence distinct from mere poverty of the lefty cause du jour.