Weird News

[Undertoad]

Much better stated LL thank you

First we have to decide on murders versus deaths. I think murders is the thing we really care about. We are not trying to work out the detail of all the bad things that might go wrong in the world. The deaths number includes suicides and accidents and criminals killed by cops. Intimidations is a strange one, since a lot of criminals are generally not intimidated by anything but force. Often the mere possibility of presence of a gun undermines criminal behavior. The gun doesn't actually have to be there.

As far as ghetto goes, it is not a manipulation. The number of gun murders in the ghetto is at least 10 times higher than in your worst Walmart Texan nightmare. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight breaks it down for us. He rudely breaks it down by black homicide victims in the US (19.4 per 100,000) versus white homicide victims (2.5 per 100,000). That's not exactly it, because that's not exactly the ghetto. And black non-ghetto neighborhoods are not a problem anyway. This is not a racial thing. It is a ghetto thing.

Gun murders also occur elsewhere

This particular line of argument is my pet peeve. Not all gun murders happen in the ghetto. Fine, although most do. So where are we now? If cancer rates were 90% higher in some area of town, wouldn't that be where you try to address the problem first?

It's not even a pro- or anti- gun argument. Maybe different or stricter gun control would help solve the ghetto! But as long as we aren't talking about it, how's anything going to get solved?