One of my great-grandfather's stories was that soon after immigrating from Poland he and his father found work mining coal in Indian Country (soon to become Oklahoma). The family lived in a shack abutting the local tavern. Everybody (including at least 3 children) slept on the floor due to the frequent bullets coming from the tavern.
I've been reading The Big Bonanza by Dan De Quille, and he relates how early miners at the Comstock Lode would surround their beds with stacks of sandbags to protect themselves from stray bullets.
TBH in many places in the US you still have regular shootings, and bullets also do get into homes. Residential homes are also built way more crappily now than the log cabins of old times. So nothing much changed about the shooting part. Compare it to Europe which has deweaponized itself.
This isn't true. Shootings are very, very rare. And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.
Gun murders in the U.S. are a very low percentage of deaths (0.39%) and preventable deaths (~1.1%, there's some disagreement about what's "preventable"). That's 0.0036% of the population per year gun-murdered. That this statistic is 3x some other country's is irrelevant because 3x a small number is still a small number. If your goal is to prevent untimely deaths, focus on boring things like falls, car accidents, and diabetes.
> And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.
I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote about people living close to such a tavern having to watch out.
As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
And yes, focusing on falls, car accidents and diabetes would be awesome. But preventing gun deaths is important too.
> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out.
I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun.
> As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
You're right that, among untimely deaths, gun murders move up the ranking if you're looking at young people. But this misses the main thing, which is that untimely deaths of any kind are super rare among young people, even rarer than overall. Why should we care if gun murders make up 50% of untimely deaths among young people if the likelihood of untimely death is sufficiently low? Your line of reasoning seems to indicate a 10% chance of untimely death with 1 percentage point of that being gun murder is preferable to a 1% chance of untimely death with 0.5 percentage points of that being gun murder.
As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing. It's like the classic "The U.S. is [embarassingly] #44 in math achievement". This means nothing if the top 80 countries are tightly clustered around 98 math achievement points.
> But preventing gun deaths is important too.
My point is that it isn't important. There are much, much bigger fish to fry from a public health perspective. The marginal benefit of throwing one dollar at "gun violence" is << the marginal benefit of throwing that same buck at something like trying to get construction workers to wear proper safety harnesses.
Getting hit with a bullet isn't the only risk of living in an area with community violence. We're not robots who can coolly base our response to danger on a statistical risk assessment. Living with community violence has serious psychological consequences which result in significant, measurable problems for those who endure it... particularly children.
Unsurprisingly, the communities who most frequently endure violence are not a representative sample of the US population— they are drastically more likely to be poor and not white. Black communities are particularly subject to this violence, and considering that discrimination against them was not only legal, but legally mandated until around a decade before the first millennials were born, the dominant culture within the US has a moral obligation to address this violence because it's responsible for its creation.
I encourage you to make your argument with numbers. Even if I end up not agreeing, it will be a much better argument. I agree that there are downstream effects of violence, and it's a good point. It's still going to be dwarfed by all the boring stuff (e.g. diabetes). The fact that you think that the "dominant culture" (which one is that? "White" isn't a culture) has a "moral obligation" is, I think, just a result of how you've evolved to think about interpersonal violence through a moral lens and diabetes through a public health lens. If your goals have to do with "saving lives", or increasing the number of hours lived, or preventing unexpected deaths, even among specifically Black Americans, gun violence isn't the road to go down.
Painting the picture of violence as being visited upon e.g. Black communities by the world, or Whites, or the "dominant culture" is incorrect. The vast majority of murders in the Black population are committed by Black people. A black man is ~15x more likely to murder than an American who is not a black man. You can do some contortions to locate the causality elsewhere (like through a vague cultural legacy of slavery), but the evidence is overwhelming that violence is endemic to Black cultures in the U.S.
The sooner we all admit that to ourselves and start working on actual solutions that address the real problem, rather than pretending the problem is things like "they're poor and oppressed", the sooner we will all be able to help them build a better world for themselves. There are many poor, and possibly oppressed (if you are poor can you not be oppressed?) communities that do not have this problem of endemic violence, which is great evidence that the problem isn't one of mere poverty. And it's important to remember, too, that no U.S. populations are poor on a world scale. We're so rich our poor are too fat.
Statistically, for kids, the dominant causes of death are car accidents and drowning. The rest you can pretty much not worry about. Another way to look at it is if you read about it in the paper, it is rare enough you don't need to worry about it.
> As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing.
That is correct, but please note that it's still a significant component. In the 15-24 age group, the top 1 cause has 13.4k deaths, the top 2 has 5.7k, and homicide has 5.1k. That's not very far away in relative terms.
> but please note that it's still a significant component.
I guess my overall point is it's not important. Even if the ordinal ranking is informative in this case (your argument), the overall likelihood of any kind of death is so low that we shouldn't care very much about the ranking.
>. And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.
And even then they are basically concentrated around illegal parts of the economy. Drug traffickers, pimps, etc. can't use the courts and the police so when it comes to settling disputes they have to DIY their own threats of violence that other people usually outsource to the state.
It's a big factor; legalizing soft drugs and managing hard drugs (like methadone clinics) will definitely help. Social safety nets to help prevent people going poor. Quality education for everyone. Quality housing for everyone.
There's a lot of things the US can do to massively improve the quality of life for everyone, it just means funneling some of the trillions it puts into the military and "the economy" (like the trillion that vaporized within minutes last march) elsewhere. I mean they can solve a lot of people's problems with a trillion dollars.
Afaik, personal conflict and relationships are most common reasons for murders. It is less likely to be business nowdays and more likely that someone violent with poor impulse control got angry at friend again.
Aren't rural areas also the ones with more murders per capita and more shooting deaths, mostly due to large prevalence of guns and bad economic situation?
As in, the urban ghetto is often stated, but rural parts do come up in stats quite a lot too.
Compare it to what? People are going to people. Just because your continent doesn't have the same gun laws as the US doesn't mean there's any less crime - gun related or otherwise. There are quite a few Europeans that wish they had guns so they weren't stabbed, dashed with acid, or beheaded.
> There are quite a few Europeans that wish they had guns so they weren't stabbed, dashed with acid, or beheaded.
There isn't a pro-gun-rights movement to speak of in the UK. Not sure about the rest of Europe.
As JacobSuperslav said, acid attacks and beheadings are extremely rare events in Europe, and aren't at all representative of the average murder. This is why they make international news. Stabbings are of course more common.
Compare the murder rates of Detroit MI, Cheyenne WY, London, and Shanghai, and then tell me which city has a weapon problem and which city has a culture problem, or both!
I’m confused by this comment too. Why Detroit? It has the third highest rate of any US city in 2017. Was that the point?
For comparison the US national rate in 2019 was 5 and NYC (more comparable to London and Shanghai) has a rate of 2.8.
Yeah, look ... I like the 2A too and don’t think guns cause higher murder rates. But there is no data to support the narrative that Europe and other countries are more dangerous in some way because they don’t have guns.
Edit: To be clear, there is no evidence that they are more dangerous. They look safer.
NYC is smoothed out by a population of millions of people. Take a look at DC... Take a look at the average small American town. Most have 0 murders, or 1 or 2. Not everywhere is like Chicago and Detroit with hundreds of murders a year
"Europeans" (everyone from Ireland to Moldova?) are constantly talking about how safe their countries are, but the reality is that in America, not everywhere is Detroit or Baltimore. You guys are literally falling victim to fake news.
The average small town will have a maximum of 1 or 2 murders per year. Cheyenne has only 60,000 people.
