Rod Dreher offers some thoughts on guns and murder in America:
I live in rural Louisiana. I would say that most households in my parish have at least one gun, and many more than one. Poverty is common; gun violence is not. Forty miles away is inner-city Baton Rouge. Poverty is common — and so is gun violence. Something else is going on.
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The Baton Rouge Advocate reported earlier this year that while gun crime is spreading all over the city, it remains heavily concentrated among poor black people in the northern part of the city. The victims and the killers are both likely to be young black men. And Baton Rouge police say drugs are usually at the center of killings there.
According to 2011 FBI statistics, blacks were responsible for 37 percent all murders in the US — three times the percentage of African-Americans in the US population. Unsurprisingly, young men, too, were disproportionately responsible for murders. And broken down by murder and victim, statistics show that in 2011, US murders are heavily a matter of white people killing white people, and black people killing black people.
So: if your state has lots of black people in it, you will have more killings overall, given that they are disproportionately represented among killers and victims. One in three Louisianians are black, versus 13 percent nationwide. If gun homicides are disproportionately concentrated among African-Americans, then states with proportionately larger African-American populations are going to register higher rates of gun homicides. Moreover, according to the 2010 Census, 60 percent of New Orleanians are black, and 33 percent white — the exact opposite of the black-white ratio in the rest of the state. The black-white ratio in Baton Rouge is comparable. You do the math.
Right. Louisiana has the nation’s highest murder rate (12.3 per 100,000 population), and the second highest percentage of blacks. Contrast that with Western and Northern Europe-like murder rates: Wyoming = 2.0, Wisconsin = 2.6 (thanks Milwaukee; Wisconsin’s murder rate sans Milwaukee is 1.0), Vermont = 1.3, Utah = 1.4, North Dakota = 2.0, New Hampshire = 0.9, Minnesota = 1.5, Maine = 2.0, Iowa = 1.3, Idaho = 1.5. By my calculation, taking Baton Rouge and New Orleans out of the equation, Louisiana’s murder rate falls by half.
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Yes. I’ve had the sense for some time that Rod has taken the red pill.
police say drugs are usually at the center of killings there.
Hey coppers, you spelled “blacks” wrong
Pretty sure most of the Meth and Oxy cartels in hollers all over the South are white rednecks, so I don’t think it is the drugs…
Yeah; he did that Crunchy Con stuff for awhile. He’s getting there, but it’s been a slow journey.
Uh-oh…..the article….das rayciss!!!!!
Just when it seems like Dreher “gets it”, he does a retrogression like when he made illegal aliens “Texans of the Year” for his Dallas newspaper or when he wrote an article in which he came close to playing the cuckold fetishist.
Funny thing about Maine’s murder rate is that it still gets a boost from blacks. Blacks make up 1% of pop but 5% of murderers. Let’s be happy at least someone mentioned the unspeakable black male overrepresentation in the murder rate fact in a public sphere.
I do think drugs are at the center of many US murders whether in the drug trade, addicted to or on the actual drug. The shame in public officials recognizing this is that they never question whether the US approach to law enforcement with the war on drugs is culpable. I’ll give Chris Christie credit that he signed into law a move to put low level offenders through rehab treatment rather than just lock them up.
Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away.
It’s just a shot away.
Especially if you live near NAMs.
Reading this stuff is like deja vu all over again. Disproportionate black crime rates have been known by those without blinders on for decades now. People who live near black ghettoes know it without needing to look at any FBI stats, and they too have known it for a long while.
Rod, this isn’t some magnificent, dangerous, breathless discovery you’re making here, unless you think that being honest with yourself and your readers is a major discovery.
Blacks are actually likely responsible for more than 1/2 of murders in the U.S. Note that the statistics link to show that blacks are responsible for more murders than whites. 28% of blacks are perpetrated by people of unknown race. A basic guess would be to split the unknowns according to the known proportions, to preserve the black:white murder rate ratio. This reasoning would lead to the conclusion that blacks perpetrate more than half of murders.
28% of murders, not 28% of blacks.
Our society is in that awkward phase where we all know the truth, but are still pretending to believe in lies.
I lived in South Louisiana for a short time. I now live in the New York city area. As a state, Louisiana is rich in resources yet suffers from a narrow mindset. People did not seem receptive to changes, particularly the ones with some power. That type of provincialism is going to set off a bunch of unwanted consequences. In this case, violence caused by ignorance and poverty is one of them. Louisiana has good universities yet some people live so far away mentally from reaching the halls of an institution that no amount of scholarships will reach them. This is sad. It doesn’t help that the cost of living skyrocketed after Katrina and Rita. You have an already poor population that is even poorer. Wages in the deep south are very low and the cycle of poverty is nearly impossible to break. There are societal barriers (e.g. being from poor and marginal family), economic barriers (e.g. low wages and high expenses) and personal barriers (e.g. the chains of poverty can mentally shackle people) which perpetuate poverty. Until LA understands that providing people with living wage jobs will increase access to an education (no matter how basic) and minimize crime by increasing productivity, nothing will ever change. I moved to the NYC area with trepidation and things are pretty ok out here. Yes there is crime, but nothing like BR. I can only say I am glad to be out of Louisiana even though I think it is a wonderfully beautiful and culturally rich state.
Most folks living in poor neighborhoods do what they can to SURVIVE. They have become accustomed to this way of life. It seems normal. They are limited by knowledge/exposure of any other way to live. The same can be said about poverty and racism in Louisiana. Citizens are used to it. Most whites in Southern States do not believe blacks are equal while preaching, praying, and denying being racist, and are fine with extreme poverty.
It’s not that the War on Drugs creates criminals (other than as a marginal phenomenon). It’s that the War on Drugs puts the trade in the hands of criminals. If drugs were the root cause, college campuses would be filled with the same kinds of violent turf battles, gun fights, beheadings, etc. When was the last time anybody had to risk their life buying marijuana in a criminal ghetto?
The War on Drugs needs to be ended in order to deprive criminals of their funding. Criminals have very few sustainable talents outside of violence and intimidation. We’ve legalized gambling, enabled payday/pawn/title loans, and nobody’s getting kneecapped anymore. We’ve decriminalized alcohol and enacted sunshine laws for municipal government. (We also started handing out municipal contracts to “minorities” instead of guys whose last names end in vowels, but that’s another thread). What are all the guidos doing now? They’re on disability and telling their higher IQ offspring to go into real estate or outside sales, which is a hell of a lot better than beating up shopowners and hijacking trucks.
For blacks, we would need to take the additional steps of ending dysgenic welfare and kicking the violent ones out of the schools. Lots of short-term pain, but there’s no other way to do it.
AR – even adjusting for poverty, blacks commit more crime.
When anti-gun activists compare our gun murder rate to Europe, they are making a horrible mistake. Our murder rates should be compared to countries with the same demographic make-up. For example, Mexico has a much higher murder rate than the U.S. even though they have the same gun restriction policies as many European countries. Anybody going to guess why? Hmmm?
Also note that nonblack Hispanics are rolled into the White category in that link.
“When was the last time anybody had to risk their life buying marijuana in a criminal ghetto?”
I can attest to the fact that it happens all the time in Milwaukee and Chicago; that is, whites nad middle-class-and-up folk of all backgrounds frequent low-income ‘hoods to buy their various dopes; I’d say, in Chicago in the late 90s, the cocaine trade was 90%+ run by black and Puerto Rican gangs, while a percentage close to that comprised white consumers ——- but I’m not interested in some a-ha racial causation moment, and don’t run from many of the race-realist denouments on black America.
Rather, even in that underworld, both the consumers and the distributors know the unwritten rules: fellow runners may get caught up in the fray, legally or illegally —— but innocent or ‘square’ consumers, as well as police in any form, DO NOT hurt —– or there will be hell to pay.
Of course, given the characters of all the players involved, said rules are broken from time-to-time. But they nonetheless form the parameters of the game, and all involved clearly know them.
anti-racist said: Most whites in Southern States do not believe blacks are equal while preaching, praying, and denying being racist, and are fine with extreme poverty.
The truth is that with most whites, the farther away they live from blacks, the more they love them. Rich whites in gated communities always love blacks. Poor whites in the south, who come in constant contact with blacks? Not so much.
Having lived in New Orleans for eleven years, I can assure you that New Orleans has the worst race-relations in America. But I’m sure that’s the fault of the 33% white population. It always is . . . even when it’s not.
37% is a huge drop in percentage of black murderers, it has generally hovered in the low 50s for years. More than a third “unknown”? There’s some sort of statistical juggling going on here.
Blacks now commit only 37% of murders in this country? Have the other 15% dropped down the Memory Hole? Scary to see the Federales lie so flagrantly.
OTOH, West Virginia has a very high murder rate for a state with so few blacks.
In the words of Big Brother, the title of this post has always been “Smelling Salts”
Anti racist, I thought you were a funny troll but with your comments here, I see otherwise. Poverty and single parent homes and hopelessness are the makings of high crime areas.
NYT, 12/22/12: “In 2011, Puerto Rico broke its own record, with 1,135 homicides, a rate of 30 killings per 100,000 residents.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/us/justice-dept-and-puerto-rico-agree-to-overhaul-the-islands-troubled-police-force.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0