In case we don’t have enough to blame social media for, we can now blame it for young American men killing each other. It kind of makes sense. If the main cause of murder in this country is simply young men fighting, and guns simply make that fighting much more deadly, then it just makes sense that social media is a channel fueling that cycle of retaliation and revenge among young men left out of the formal economy.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Before 2007, Americans bought around 7 million guns per year. By 2016, it was around 17 million. In 2020, it was 23 million. Those are the facts and figures. Now for my opinion: no matter how responsible the vast majority of gun owners are, you are going to have a lot more suicides, homicides, and fatal accidents with so many guns around. And sure enough, firearms are now the leading cause of death in children according to CDC. That makes me sick to think about.
Most hopeful story: It makes a lot of sense to tax land based on its potential developed value, whether it has been developed to that level or not. This discourages land speculation, vacant and abandoned property in cities while raising revenue that can offset other taxes.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The U.S. may have alien spacecraft at Area 51 after all. Or, and this is purely my speculation, they might have discovered anti-gravity and want to throw everybody else off the scent.
This article is from ProPublica, so you can take this person’s opinion on root causes however you want. But numbers are numbers, and checkable. Here are some numbers:
According to KFF (which I hadn’t previously heard of, but describes itself as “the independent source for health policy research, polling, and news”), firearms are the leading cause of death among children in the United States.
Guns – including accidental deaths, suicides, and homicides – killed 4,357 children (ages 1-19 years old) in the United States in 2020, or roughly 5.6 per 100,000 children.
In each of the peer countries, guns kill fewer children than motor vehicles, cancer, congenital diseases, and other injuries, and often behind other conditions such as heart disease.
The U.S. is the only country among its peers that has seen a substantial increase in the rate of child firearm deaths in the last two decades (42%). All comparably large and wealthy countries have seen child firearm deaths fall since 2000. These peer nations had an average child firearm death rate of 0.5 per 100,000 children in the year 2000, falling 56% to 0.3 per 100,000 children in 2019.
KFF
This is certainly disturbing and upsetting. I suppose there is some context to consider. For example, children don’t die in large numbers of preventable diseases, which is a great thing, so when they do die it is mostly from rare diseases and accidehttps://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/guntrol.pngnts. I would want to know how the U.S. compares in overall child mortality to the other industrialized countries considered in this study. Probably not favorably, but not mentioned in this study. I would be interested to know what the breakdown between children and older teens is, and what the breakdown between accidents, homicides, and suicides is. These are all tragedies, but each cause of death within each age group would have different root causes and different solutions.
Regardless, it is negligent and ignorant that we are letting this happen, and yet more proof our country is truly “exceptional”, just not in the good way.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
Most hopeful story: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Taser drones? Seriously, this might have been my most interestingly random post last month. I’ll try to do better.
Mass shooters are often motivated by essentially suicidal fantasies. They just sometimes decide to take an elementary school class with them. It’s hard to be sympathetic, but then again it highlights how the lack of access to quality health care and mental health care in particular is part of what is rotting our society from the inside out. t seems to me we are lumping unrelated phenomena from a few categories:
The latter two you could maybe lump together, although ironically these groups would consider each other enemies. The first two are completely different though. There are several different problems here with several different solutions.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still too many guns in too many hands and too many people who think more violence is the answer to our violence problem.
Shot Spotter is a set of microphones installed on telephone poles around a city that is supposed to allow police to respond rapidly to gun shots. It actually came to mind when I read recently about people in violence-impacted Philadelphia neighborhoods asking the police for more cameras. This article is about Chicago, and is generally critical of the technology on racial justice grounds. It sounds like the system there is perceived as yet another way for the police to harass people. That sounds bad, but I can imagine this being one more piece of evidence useful for prosecuting a violent crime after the fact. I can imagine a combination of video, audio, and eyewitness testimony being pretty persuasive.
A report commissioned by the Philadelphia has some facts and figures on shootings, both fatal (the layman might refer to these as “murders”) and non-fatal. Here are just a few that caught my eye:
The book Ghettoside referred to a 40% clearance rate in Los Angeles during the height of the 1990s murder surge there. It is remarkable how similar the 37% number above is. Doing the math, the chances of a murderer being caught and convicted is something like 1 in 3. Again, in a surprising echo of what that book discussed, the recommendations of this report mostly talk about crime prevention and suppression strategies. They specifically talk about dedicating more resources to investigation of non-fatal shootings, but they do not recommend increasing the number of homicide detectives or improving their training.
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.
This is one of those in-depth articles that GQ puts out every now and then.
Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year…
