[TTAG] Repeatedly in the press, we see "it’s the guns, it’s the guns, it’s the guns" as the explanation for homicide in the United States, but this rhetoric only serves to obscure the actual homicide problem. I don’t believe that black Americans are more inherently violent than any other group of Americans, but I do believe the country at large, particularly its white liberal faction, needs to come to grips with what’s going on in the black community before anything can be fixed.As we go through this deep dive, we will discover the mathematical key to solving the murder problem in the United States lies not in gun control, nor even in socioeconomics, but rather in repairing the family unit across all demographics.
As is often the case on Handwaving Freakoutery, we are going to begin with mathematics, and attempt to replicate this entirely unsourced graph I saw on Twitter last week . . .
Longish, lots of charts, but seems well argued.
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What do we take away from this in convenient 280-character Twitter-worthy snippets?
1. If US black and Latino murder rates were the same as US white murder rates, then the United States would have the same murder rate as our economic peer nations even with more than 400 million guns in circulation,
2. Whites own more guns per capita than black folks or Latinos and there’s an inverse correlation between ownership and murder across those demographics, so "it’s the guns" is not explanatory for the murder rate differential in these populations,
3. The racist hot-take of "it’s genetic" is also not explanatory, because US black Americans more than double the sub-Saharan Africa murder rate, and Latin America south of the border is almost six times more murderous than the Latinos here.
It’s not the guns. And it’s also not the genetics.
So what is it?
RTHT