Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Worth repeating: 50% of crime happens in 2% of America (and Canada!)

Here's the situation:

Data from 2014, the most recent year that a county level breakdown is available, shows us that 54% of counties (containing 11% of the population) had zero murders. 69% of counties had no more than one murder, and held about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country.
The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders. The study shows more than half of all murders occurred in just 2% of counties nationwide.

Note that 2% of counties is OVERSTATING the land area involved here.

In Chicago, the story is almost identical- with admittedly higher numbers. In the first four months of 2017, 222 murders took place in the heavily gun-controlled windy city. Lott writes, "But 23 of the 77 neighborhoods in the city have zero murders, and most of the 40 neighborhoods have only one murder. Twelve of the neighborhoods have 10 or more murders."

Yes. When you look at Cook County, you see 222 murders in four months and you think "holy shit Mabel, its open warfare!" But then you look at a Chicago crime map and see that there is a thin scatter of red dots across the map, with a few forest fires of red dots. There are a few streets where somebody gets killed pretty much every night, and the rest of the place is quiet.

Now lets talk about gun control.

When the reality is that ALL the murders take place on a few streets in Chicago, and the State of Illinois is talking about banning AR-15 rifles to "save lives", what does that mean?

The first thing it means is that either the State of Illinois can't do anything about the murders on those streets, or they don't care. Outside third option, they arranged it and they like it that way.

Hanlon's Razor says "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Going by that, we will assume that the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago are so profoundly fucked that they can't arrest a bunch of murderers and throw their sorry asses in jail.

This leads us to the second thing: gun control is what they are doing instead of fixing the problem.

Its genius, really. You have a problem you can't solve, so you blame it on a visible minority and you make their lives hell instead of doing something constructive. Kind of like what Hitler did with the Jews, but slower.

Canada, four wounded by gunfire at the Toronto Raptors victory celebration. City of Toronto doesn't know what to do about that. They know why it happened, for sure. There's a lot of assholes wandering loose who should be in jail. That's why. But the City of Toronto as a body is unwilling (or unable) to do what it would take to get those assholes in jail where they belong.

Enter the Federal Liberal Party. They propose to outright ban ownership of the AR-15 rifle, and make it harder for farmers and hunters to keep their rifles. Because they think they can sell the public a fairy tale one more time. Its an election year, and telling the people of Toronto how evil and bad those rednecked farmers are out there with their assault weapons and their pickup trucks is a lot easier than building a new jail and filling it with career criminals. And besides, those farmers are never ever going to vote Liberal anyway, so fuck 'em.

That's what's going on.

Update: Welcome Instapundit! Thanks for the linkage, Sarah Hoyt!
Upperdate: Welcome Northeast Shooters blog! 

13 comments:

paladin3001 said...

Let's put the whole Canadian (or more exactly Toronto) situation in perspective. They are talking about banning handguns and other scary black looking rifles because of gun crimes, mass shootings (most of which happen in other places then Canada), because people are terrified. Why are they terrified? News media and leftist assholes, then again I repeat myself.

All the shootings that happen in Toronto are done using ILLEGAL handguns. Those assholes didn't go to the local gun store and showed their Restricted PAL, and then walk out to shoot up their local drug dealing competition. Nope, got it from somewhere else.
A police officer told me once that they don't release the data from where handguns were purchased that are obtained when felons are arrested in possession of said item. Reason being is that it goes against the big narrative (over half of illegally used firearms are purchased in Canada *cough* bullshit *cough*). When a police officer is saying that (guy used to work in Toronto), you know that something is wrong.

Right now it's all about the feels and pandering to the leftist base. Doesn't matter that every time one of these felons is charged with a crime that involves ILLEGAL handguns, that charge is dropped eventually. Crown Prosecutors aren't doing their job and letting these criminals skate on lesser "easier" charges. That's the big problem right there.

The Phantom said...

Hi Paladin, thanks for the comment.

"A police officer told me once that they don't release the data from where handguns were purchased that are obtained when felons are arrested in possession of said item."

Of course they don't. They don't release anything. What they do is "leak" specific tidbits to the press, always the ones that make the Liberals and the Toronto police force look good. Or at least look less bad. The public never finds out where X offender got his gun, what kind of gun it was, what race Mr. X was, nothing. We don't need to know that. We need to know that everything is all taken care of, and we can get back to work paying those taxes.

Anonymous said...

I am not sure about Canada, but in the US those high-crime neighborhoods have a demographic commonality which it is absolutely forbidden to mention in polite company, like uttering Sauron's name.

I couldn't help but notice that you didn't mention it either. Nor me. But we all know precisely what the truth is.

William said...

A couple of years ago I read an article which was attempting to correlate murder rates with the severity of gun laws in the fifty states. Since the state-by-state murder rate data was sitting there in front of me in the article, I thought I would do a little statistical analysis myself so I proceeded to look up the percentage of population of each state of a certain unnamed demographic and then plugged that info and the murder rates from the article into Excel and ran a regression. Voila, a very strong correlation. I was SO surprised. Not.

Anonymous said...

Yes. This is a cultural issue that no one wants to address. Because all cultures are equally virtuous or something.

Jay Maynard said...

As Eric Raymond puts it, the US is divided into two groups of neighborhoods: the inner cities look like Somalia, the rest looks like Switzerland. It's the Somalias that are the problem.

Greg said...

You got linked on Instapundit.

The Phantom said...

Linked on Instapundit, WOOT! ~:D

The Phantom said...

Anonymous said: "I am not sure about Canada, but in the US those high-crime neighborhoods have a demographic commonality which it is absolutely forbidden to mention in polite company, like uttering Sauron's name."

Yes, and that's why I didn't mention it. But there's also another reason, which is "Correlation Does Not Prove Causation."

What I always like about these crime maps is the "zero murder" areas RIGHT NEXT to the "free-fire" zones.

When you see a discontinuity like that, you know it isn't a disease, or an inheritable trait, or a race, or any other kind of social condition. With something like that, you have a central high rate, and then a gradual drop off over some distance ans the effect drops off. Inverse square law, or some variation.

But we don't see that. We see "all the murders" and right literally across the street we see "no murders".

That is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. That is an arrangement.

Strelnikov said...

"we will assume that the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago are so profoundly fucked that they can't arrest a bunch of murderers and throw their sorry asses in jail."

As a resident, I can confirm this to be accurate.

Anonymous said...

In Chicago, most of the murderers are members of gangs which provide political support to the Democratic machine that runs Cook County and so they are as immune from prosecution as Jussie Smollett. I assume that something similar is going on in the other high crime areas.

ConquerorofAllFoesCheese said...

The last time I looked (a few months ago) at the FBI crime data, over half of all homicides (including justifies) occurred in only 25 US cities. Some very large (Chicago), some fairly small (Gary, IN or Flint, MI). Maybe one of them has had a Republican mayor in the past 20-30 years, and none of them has had a Republican-majority city council. Just saying.

Anonymous said...

"... those high-crime neighborhoods have a demographic commonality which it is absolutely forbidden to mention in polite company..."

OK, since no one else will, I'll mention it: Young male blacks.

But...while skin color, at least in this instance, is a handy marker, the real issue is culture. Culture crosses boundaries - racial, sexual, age, geographic, all of 'em. (If you don't think "geography" should be on that list, I'll offer Ilhan Omar as proof that it does).

(American) Blacks are an easy target for this because they should be; blacks live in a culture that's dysfunctional, and not just slightly dysfunctional, but hugely so. With the complicity of white liberal doo-gooders aiding and abetting, and a large handful of decades, the black family has been destroyed, the concept of personal responsibility has been murdered, the idea of educational achievement got knifed in an alley, the list goes on.

Charles Murray et al, and the history of the African continent, testify that a particular genetic group - African-heritage blacks - as a group - has a lower intelligence level than other genetic groups.

Heresy, that, because The Left preaches that we're all the same and everyone's entitled to All The Same Opportunities. Which they have to do because The Left doesn't believe in individuals, it can only focus on "group identities" and their Kumbaya mantra is "we're all the same."

Reality, as always, is a Stone Cold Heartless Bitch. No clue what the ratio is (Murray & co-authors might), but for every Thomas Sowell, George Washington Carver and Cab Calloway there's a certain number of barely-capable fast food workers. That ratio happens to be higher among African-heritage blacks than European-heritage whites or Asians, but no culture, or genetic heritage, is immune from identifiable, and reasonably mearsurable, distributions of intelligence because it's genetic. Now, just because there's a genetic predisposition for something does not mean that the culture cannot learn, adjust and compensate for it. Example: humans cannot pick up a 4-ton steel beam, so we learned to design machines for that and figured out how to operate them.

Notably, we did not gather around the steel beam and cry, nor did we organize protests against it or refuse to design only those buildings that required beams we could pick up.

We got off our asses, figured out what we wanted to accomplish, developed the culture necessary to learn how, and did it. Failure was examined and corrected; quite specifically, failure was not placed in a position of honor and repeated. For proof, see: Egypt, pyramids; U.S., suspension bridges; etc. Also see: Civilization, Western.

There's a lesson in that.