Tag Archives: violence

Jeffrey Sachs on (gun) violence

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I have just two things to say about the U.S. and guns, both of which I find obvious and evidence-based. First, the U.S. has a violence problem and guns are not the root cause of it. Eliminating guns would not eliminate the problem. Second, guns make our violence problem much more deadly.

I pointed out a really interesting data analysis that was posted on R-bloggers in 2015. What the numbers show very clearly is that the U.S. really does have a violence problem, with rates of violent death much higher than countries with similar economies, including our close cultural cousins like Canada and Australia, and, almost uniquely among richer countries, similar in levels of violence to many developing countries. These are hard numbers, so have a look and draw your own conclusions. My conclusions are backed up by my own personal experiences living in ultra-low-crime developed Asian countries (like Singapore) and significant time spent in developing Asian countries (like Thailand). In the latter, I generally felt equally or more safe on the street than I do in my home city of Philadelphia. Developing countries have problems with gang violence and organized crime to be sure, but it is random street crime that affects ordinary people, business travelers and tourists, and that just isn’t very common in most countries. The two countries I mentioned are actually pretty interesting because in Singapore, there are absolutely no weapons of any kind allowed in the hands of the public, while in Thailand, my impression is there are quite a few guns around.

So that said, here is Jeffrey Sachs talking about violence in the U.S. The rest of the article goes on to make a “states’ rights” pitch for gun control which I don’t feel strongly about one way or another. One thing I would favor though is to let individual cities pass and enforce stricter gun laws than the states they are in, if they want to.

Mass violence is deeply rooted in American culture. America’s European settlers committed a two-century-long genocide against the native inhabitants, and established a slave economy so deeply entrenched that only a devastating civil war ended it. In almost all other countries, even Czarist Russia, slavery and serfdom were ended by decree or legislation, without a four-year bloodletting. When it was over, America established and enforced a century-long system of apartheid.

To this day, America’s homicide and imprisonment rates are several times higher than Europe’s. Several large mass shootings occur each year – in a country that is also waging several seemingly endless wars overseas. America is, in short, a country with a past history and current stark reality of racism, ethnic chauvinism, and resort to mass violence.

Ouch, I certainly think he is on to something. But I also think the modern obsession with guns is fueled by an industry lobby funding political campaigns and saturating all forms of entertainment with guns. I would have to do research to prove it, but I bet the industry provides free guns to the entertainment industry just as the cigarette companies did decades ago. The military certainly does this openly, I believe with the idea of desensitizing the public to the carnage of foreign wars and desensitizing our children so they can one day be recruited to fight in those wars. Guns, fights and car chases are also sort of a lazy, easy and cheap substitute for actual storytelling. So one idea would be for a few movie and TV studios and game companies to make a pledge to go a few months and see if they can tell interesting stories that don’t have any guns in them. Another quick idea would be to adjust movie, TV, and game ratings to make it crystal clear that stories with guns in them are for adults only. If necessary to prop up earnings, sprinkle in some tasteful soft porn to compensate, which I believe would be much healthier for children.

Inequality and violence in Europe and the U.S.

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Following the shocking events in Belgium, maybe people here in the U.S. should reflect on inequality and violence closer to home. Here is a Slate article called Why Belgium Is Such a Hotbed for Islamic Terrorism:

As my Slate colleague Josh Keating wrote last November, the apparent concentration of Islamic extremism in Belgium is largely the result of a group called Sharia4Belgium and its charismatic leader Fouad Belkacem. The group, which was founded in Antwerp and first gained attention by staging public commemorations of the 9/11 attacks, has capitalized on the high rates of poverty among Muslims in Belgium, as well as anger over widespread discrimination against Muslims and bans on Islamic veils that were passed in Antwerp in 2009 and at the national level in 2011.

Speaking to CNN for a recent article, the brother of two young men who left Belgium for Syria cited a sense of marginalization and a lack of opportunity as the main drivers of radicalization. “The Belgian state rejects children and young people,” he was quoted as saying. “They say, ‘They are all foreigners, why should we give them a job?’ They fill us with hate, and they say we aren’t of any use, so when young people see what’s going on over there [in Syria], they think ‘Well OK, let’s go there and be useful.’ ”

Which makes me wonder, if poverty and inequality are really the issues, can we see that in the statistics compared to a random country like…oh, I don’t know…the United States of America? For a ready source of statistics, it’s fun to go to the CIA World Factbook. Here are the poverty rates and Gini Index for the two countries. The Gini Index is a measure of how wealth is spread across households, ranging from 0 (a hypothetical perfectly equal distribution) to 100 (a hypothetical case where one household has all the wealth and all the others have nothing). We can also look at GDP per capita at purchasing power parity and unemployment just to round it out.

GDP Per Capita

  • Belgium: $44,100 (34th highest in the world)
  • USA: $56,300 (19th highest in the world)

Unemployment Rate

  • Belgium: 8.6%
  • USA: 5.2%

Poverty Rate

  • Belgium: 15.1%
  • USA: 15.1%

Gini Index

  • Belgium: 25.9 (8th most equal out of 144 countries tracked)
  • USA: 45 (43rd most unequal out of 144 countries tracked)

So average income is a bit higher in the U.S. Unemployment is fairly high in Belgium, but the poverty rate happens to be identical for the most recent statistics. The U.S. is much more unequal (Belgium is right up there with the most equal countries in the world, including the Scandinavian countries.) So it is a little hard to see the U.S. having the moral high ground when it comes to poverty or inequality. And yet our media is pointing to poverty and inequality as the reasons for the violence in Belgium. I suppose it is possible that the poverty and violence that does exist disproportionately involves one ethnic group. But that too is true of the United States.

Let’s look at one more set of statistics which I pointed out recently –  deaths from violent assault happen at more than double the rate in the U.S. than they do in Belgium. So the body count is actually much higher here. It is just less shocking because we have come to take the daily violence on our streets as normal, which is sad.

 

U.S. Fascism?

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Is it even remotely possible that the U.S. could go down a Fascist path? I don’t know. Let’s first ask if the U.S. unequivocally qualifies as a democracy. If you set the lowest possible bar, democracy could just mean that government leaders are nominally chosen by majority vote, and there is therefore a process for non-violent change of government. We pass that test. A better definition though, in my view, would be that there is a process for choosing government policies that represent a consensus among most of the people, and that represent a compromise reflecting the interests of most of the people. We clearly do not have this. We clearly have policies that represent the interests of a relatively small class of political and business elites, and we have an entrenched political party system that presents almost insurmountable obstacles to anyone who might seriously challenge that social order. It would take widespread violence or civil disobedience to do that, which is the opposite of a functioning democratic political system. So we have a fairly rigid social order enforced by traditional elites.

If our definition of fascism involves jack boots and arm bands and cattle cars, clearly we are not even close, thank goodness. But could we be headed there? What is a registry database for a small minority religious group, if not a modern version of the armband? Robert Paxton’s stages of fascism start with a sense of victim-hood, nationalism based on religion or ethnicity, anger, and some external or internal enemy to blame. We seem to have these ingredients, at least among the angry white men supporting Donald Trump. Next comes a charismatic leader. I don’t find Donald charismatic, but some people clearly do. Next comes acceptance of the extremists by the conservative establishment because they are not strong enough to govern on their own. I don’t think we are there yet, but we did have the recent capitulation of the more moderate conservative elements in Congress to the Tea Party extremists. After these stages come the assumption of power and exercise of power. That is hard to imagine, but we will find out by this time next year.

I still think Donald Trump is a clown. An amoral attention-seeking clown at best, a Fascist clown at worst. It is reassuring that demographics continue to shift so that angry white men can’t just always get their way, no matter how loud and menacing they are. But I am getting just a bit worried. More geopolitical turbulence or random acts of violence in the next year could shift more people into a scared, angry state of mind where they are more open to the extremist rhetoric.

domestic terrorism

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Outgoing Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter said

“Domestic terrorism is international terrorism,” Nutter said. “There is really no level of distinction between the violence that goes on, on the streets of America on a daily basis and the episodic acts of international terrorism that also take place — primarily in cities…”

“Citizens around the world feel unsafe because of international terrorists … those same feelings exist for many in (American) communities,” Nutter said. “These criminals are terrorizing our citizens and that same level of fear of violence, the death of citizens, the destruction of property, are the same. In many cities across the United States of America on a weekend, you very well could have six, eight, 10 people shot.”

He called for a stronger relationship between federal and local officials to address American violence with the same sense of urgency and priority given to global terrorism.

Well, let’s think about how this is and isn’t true. There seem to be two ingredients that lead to violence, whether on an American street or in the Middle East. One is young men with something to be angry about, and time on their hands to do something about it. The second is a culture of violence that makes it okay to act on those angry impulses. I think you need both of these things. So to de-escalate, you need to understand and address peoples’ real grievances, keep them busy by providing economic opportunity, and gradually work on changing cultures than glorify violence.

If you just go by body count, gun violence in American cities is much worse. As Nutter pointed out, a body count of 200-300 per year from gun crime is typical in cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore. Nationwide, the body count due to murder is 15,000 per year or so. But you can put that in the context of about 30,000 suicides and 30,000 deaths by motor vehicle. So that’s a lot of violent death. If you really wanted to prevent the most violent deaths, you would tackle some of these sources rather than international terrorism, or even the domestic crazies who occasionally gun down students, children, theater and church goers.

But there is the unexpected shock aspect to terrorism, whether international or just some nut in a theater. The gun violence and car crashes on our streets are so familiar they don’t shock us any more, even though they kill orders of magnitude more people every year even compared to 9/11. After 9/11 the United States started two wars of choice and spent over a trillion dollars. This seems to have escalated the violence rather than reducing it.

I’m not suggesting international terrorism doesn’t have to be dealt with. It has to be monitored and disrupted. There is the risk that an extremist group could get their hands on a nuclear or biological weapon, and then the body count would be shocking indeed and it could seriously disrupt nations and economies for a long time.