Black punks with guns
Heather MacDonald
5 January 2009
City Journal
The New York Times has been furiously penning policy briefs to the Obama administration. A recent editorial on black crime compresses within a few hundred words decades of failed thinking on public safety. If the president-elect follows its hoary prescriptions, he will be guaranteed to waste taxpayer money without having the slightest effect on crime.
A new study of homicide among young black males prompted this latest editorial. James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt of Northeastern University found that the number of homicides committed by black males under the age of 18 rose 43 percent between 2002 and 2007, while the number of gun homicides by this same group rose 47 percent. Homicides by white youth during that period decreased slightly. But more significant were the different homicide rates that the report calculated, which no news story dared to divulge. Whereas the report’s graph for white homicides over the last 30 years plots the rate in increments of 10, the black rate is demarcated at intervals of 100. The highest homicide rate for whites over the last three decades was 32 homicides committed per 100,000 males between the ages of 18 and 24 (reached in 1991), whereas the highest homicide rate for blacks was approximately 320 homicides per 100,000 males between the ages of 18 and 24 (reached in 1993).
Even this apparent ten-to-one disparity between black and white homicide rates doesn’t tell the full story. Fox and Swatt include Hispanic homicides in the white rate, though they do not disclose that they are doing so (both the inclusion and the silence about it follow FBI practice). Hispanic crime rates are between three and four times that of whites—meaning that if one excluded the Hispanic homicides from the white rate, the black-white differential would be even larger than ten to one...
The rest of the article here.
Labels: Punks with Guns
posted by Rob Anderson @ 9:54 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Your title says that blacks shoot blacks. Your data says that blacks shoot people - it says nothing about the race of the victim. I make this point not to say anything about the data itself, simply to point out that once again you use language to obscure and ignore the facts in the data.
Aside from that, I think a good freakonomicist would ask for more data that might be useful. Your conclusion basically says that black people are killers because they are black. Does this mean that Obama is more likely to off someone tomorrow than Charles Manson? Actually, Obama is more likely to off someone tomorrow - but not because he is black, but because Manson is isolated and under guard.
If I were charged to follow up on this study, I would want to cross reference the violence with economic prosperity. I posit - and this is just an educated guess - that the real correllation is that poor people kill more people than rich people. The unrelated fact that more African-Americans are poor than white Americans, means that you will see more violence in the African-American community than in the white community.
The answer then is not simply to lock them all up - it's to figure out how to raise their socio-economic standing. I understand that is not a simple problem, otherwise it would be solved already. But to simply state - as your post appears to - that black people kill more people simply because they are black, can only be characterized with one word - rascism. So not only are you crazy, you are a crazy rascist. Have a nice day.
If you don't post my first comment, and this one, you are also a coward. I "quoted you for truth" - "black punks with guns shoot blacks"
I changed the title already, Murph. Did you read the report linked by McDonald? What kind of additonal data do you need? Young black men kill more than any other racial group. McDonald speculates about marriage and the black family as a crucial factor. And, if you click on "punks with guns" at the bottom of the post, you can see that I've written about this phenomenon before, pointing out that it has a crucial cultural element that progs like you are evidently incapable of confronting.
If marriage of parents is the predictor of violence, thanks to Prop 8 we are going to see a lot of children of gay parents headed to jail! And lest you forget, Obama our Messiah was raised by a single mother.
The article is bunk. For example they cite violence increasing during the dot com boom in San Francisco. The economic expansion at that time was very polarizing, if you were highly educated and had skills, you made a lot of money. If you didn't, you were left out - Google was not throwing stock options at high school dropouts. Poverty causes the problems, not the other way around.
No one is using terminology like "predictor." But giving birth out of wedlock is epidemic in the black community, as is the absence of traditional two-parent families. Obama had his grandparents to fall back on after his father left and his mother stayed in Indonesia. But thanks for solving the problem, Murph. Gee, I wonder why no one else ever thought of poverty as a problem?
Giving birth out of wedlock is epidemic in the POOR community.
The reason that the terminology is important is that even though it may be hard, we can in theory do something to reduce the number of poor people. The only thing that can be done to reduce the number of black people is genocide. I will go out on a limb and assume you aren't advocating that.
Blaming the problem on skin color - which is exactly what you have done - allows people to take the easy way out and say it's not worth trying to improve educational or work opportunities for African-Americans because we are driving to a consensus that it is hopeless because they are genetically inferior.
Trying to solve the problem by rounding them all up and throwing them in jail, as the original author hints, is an unworkable solution. California cannot afford the overcrowded prisons we already have.
The fact of the matter is that young black men commit more homicides than any other group. That's what the report is about, Murph. Is it racist of the report's authors to arrive at that conclusion? No one is blaming anything on "skin color," you moron. I---and I bet the authors of that report---present the facts as they understand them. The question is, Why do young black men---a small minority among black youth, too---commit so many homicides? Your conclusion about poverty is, at best, a fragmentary answer, since few poor people of all races commit homicide.
As many influential black people think---including Bill Cosby---there's a cultural component to the problem that is rarely addressed by white progressives for fear of being called racists, much like you are doing to me now. That culture is the hip-hop, rap, thug music and videos that young black men are exposed to from an early age. This culture is contemptuous of women and gays, does a lot of macho posturing, and shows guns as an important accessory for young men to be used on anyone who "disses" them or their friends. A lot of this has to do with the drug culture, of course, another thing the lyrics of many rap songs legitimize.
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