{"id":6857,"date":"2015-10-06T13:01:18","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T17:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6857"},"modified":"2015-10-06T13:56:01","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T17:56:01","slug":"vox-is-wrong-we-dont-have-too-many-guns-we-have-too-many-criminals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6857","title":{"rendered":"Vox is wrong &#8211; we don&#8217;t have too many guns, we have too many criminals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my followers on G+ asked me to comment on a Vox article, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2015\/10\/5\/9454161\/gun-violence-solution\"><br \/>\nWhat no politician wants to admit about gun control<\/a>.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve studied the evidence, and I don&#8217;t believe the effect of the Australian confiscation on homicides was significant. \u00a0You can play games with statistics to make it look that way, but they are games.<\/p>\n<p>As for the major contention of the article, it&#8217;s simply wrong. \u00a080% of U.S. crime, including gun violence, is associated with the drug trade and happens in urban areas where civil order has partially or totally collapsed.<\/p>\n<p>Outside those areas, the U.S. looks like Switzerland or Norway &#8211; lots of guns, very little crime. \u00a0Those huge, peaceful swathes of high-gun-ownership areas show that our problem is not too many guns, it&#8217;s <em>too many criminals<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The reason nobody at Vox or anywhere in the punditosphere wants to admit this is because of the racial angle. \u00a0The high-crime, high-violence areas of the U.S. are populated by blacks (who, at 12.5% of the population, commit 50% of index violent crimes). \u00a0The low-crime, lots-of-guns areas are white. <\/p>\n<p>The predictively correct observation would be that in the U.S., lots of legal weapons owned by white people doesn&#8217;t produce high levels of gun violence any more than they do in Switzerland or Norway. \u00a0 The U.S. has extraordinarily high levels of gun violence because American blacks (and to a lesser extent American Hispanics and other non-white, non-Asian minorities) are extraordinarily lawless. \u00a0As in, Third-World tribal badlands levels of lawless.<\/p>\n<p>Nobody wants to be honest about this except a handful of evil scumbag racists (and me). \u00a0Thus, the entire policy discussion around U.S. firearms is pretty much fucked from the word go.<\/p>\n<p>What would <em>I<\/em> do about it? Well, since I&#8217;m <em>not<\/em> an evil scumbag racist and in fact believe all laws and regulations should be absolutely colorblind, I would start by legalizing all drugs. \u00a0Then we could watch gun violence drop by 80% and look for the next principal driver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my followers on G+ asked me to comment on a Vox article, What no politician wants to admit about gun control. I&#8217;ve studied the evidence, and I don&#8217;t believe the effect of the Australian confiscation on homicides was significant. \u00a0You can play games with statistics to make it look that way, but they&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6857\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Vox is wrong &#8211; we don&#8217;t have too many guns, we have too many criminals<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-firearms","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6857"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6859,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6857\/revisions\/6859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}