I think it is interesting that, with the exception of Hawaii, all of the lowest murder-rate states are northern, mostly rural, and overwhelmingly white. I don't know what conclusions to draw from that, aside from the general trend that these aren't states where there is a lot of ethnic gang violence.
Murder is highly correlated with urban and minority populations - the murder rate for blacks is about 8x that of whites.[1] The root of this is clearly socioeconomic, and I believe rooted in the drug war[2], which drives black market violence both by creating a lucrative ungoverned market and by removing constructive inter-generational alternatives through mass incarceration - i.e. if your father is in prison for a non-violent drug crime, you as a child lose both a role model and a bread-winner, which makes you more likely to fall into gangs for social and economic reasons.
If that's accurate, it's a vicious, massively destructive cycle.
On the other hand, The National Gang Center says (based on survey data): "These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually." https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/measuring...
It's hardly clear that the root is socioeconomic. I don't have data on crime, but in education race remains predictive even after you include socioeconomic status in the estimator.
I haven't looked into this deeply, more of a productive assumption[1], but here are some related studies:
"the majority of the black-white gap (over 60%) [in violence] and the entire Latino-white gap are explained by a small set of factors, especially marital status of parents,
immigrant generation, and neighborhood characteristics associated with racial segregation."
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/sem...
"Despite a large difference in mean levels of family disruption between black and white communities, the percentage of white families headed by a female also had a significant effect on white juvenile and white adult violence."
"The combination of urban poverty and family disruption concentrated by race is particularly severe. Whereas the majority of poor blacks live in communities characterized by high rates of family disruption, most poor whites, even those from "broken homes," live in areas of relative family stability"
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...
"Multivariate regression results for ninety-one cities showed that while total inequality and intraracial inequality had no significant association with offending rates, interracial inequality was a strong predictor of the overall violent crime rate and the Black-on-Black crime rate."
http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/anexos/33027-...
[1] I have a hard time imagining a productive line of thought that leads from saying that high black murder rates result from something inherent to blackness
When reading studies like this, it's very helpful to look at the tables of regression coefficients rather than just reading text. Unfortunately, it can often be a career limiting move for study text to accurately reflect the contents of the data tables/regression coefficients.
The first source you cited (the rand study) shows that being African American is a strong predictor of engaging in violence, even after accounting for other factors. See table 2.
The second study doesn't address the question.
The third study (see table 2) shows that, among other factors, percentage of a city that is black is a strong predictor of violent crime even after accounting for other factors.
One productive line of thought which leads from "something inherent to blackness causes crime" is "since this problem is intractible with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things."
I don't disagree with your analysis of the studies, but the fact that a difference remains after accounting for known socioeconomic factors does not indicate that other factors do not exist.
Personally, I wouldn't call this[1] a productive thought, rather a fatalistic one.
[1] "since this problem is intractable with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things"
Agreed. I've looked into the data in the past and this is not at all clear. You don't see anywhere near the same incidence for murder or violent crime among impoverished whites or Hispanics in America. These sorts of things are much more correlated with IQ than to poverty or nearly anything else.
This fairy tale about "non-violent drug crime" is interesting because it tries to get us to forget how many violent criminals are locked up THANKFULLY due to the only charge that stuck to them, e.g. their 9th felony possession charge while armed with a loaded gun. People would have us all believe that these peaceful minorities are locked up because the cops stopped them on their way to church, found a little "medicine" on them and put them away for 20 years and left his kids orphaned. It's just nonsense. So many people get leniency in the cases of repeated drug offenses. Honestly, what is a society supposed to do with people who repeatedly break laws?
In major cities a frightening number of homicides go unsolved. Though I can't say I'm a fan of the drug war, there is value in locking up criminals that just haven't been caught doing their most violent acts. Any time somebody brings up the non-violent drug imprisonment, and the socio-econmic downward spiral, yes it's true there are a small number of people who have been railroaded who could be raising their sons and daughters, but we also need the clear image of the killer who lucky for us got pinched because he made a different mistake. All the cops in the room know he killed his cousin but everyone in the project last year was too scared to rat him out. The prosecutor is going to push the longest sentence they can get for the laws broken just so that guy can't victimize somebody else's kid.
NO. I'm saying lock up somebody for one crime you have proof on, might not have been that criminal at their worst but you got them on the proof of another. They are paying the price and they can't do their worst crimes to innocent people when they are locked up for the moment. That's value to peaceful society.
I'm typically skeptical of conclusions like that, to be honest. If we look at the gun deaths graph, many of the highest rates are in much whiter, much more rural states, and the south is very well-represented.
I'll probably draw criticism from what I'm about to say, but perhaps part of this is due to cultural differences in what constitutes murder between different states. An obvious example would be the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. I would classify that as a murder, but I don't think it would be counted as such in this data.
I think about these things a lot, as a minority who grew up in the most urban part of the country. It's very common for statistics to be misleading in what actually goes on in these areas for a number of reasons. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as a dangerous area with high murder rates, just that it's not always as simple as looking at some numbers.
I should also point out that while many high-crime areas have a high minority population, I would consider most of them rural or suburban. Milwaukee and Detroit for example, are not exactly "urban" cities.
I don't think justifiable homicide such as self-defense should count if you're wanting to answer a question of "should we keep guns or get rid of them"
Obviously having more justifiable homicides with guns is better than gun murders, because it's good people protecting themselves from violent people. I don't think a criminal who died from trying to kill me deserves to be added to a statistic to further an idea that "less guns are better"
Speaking of Trayvon Martin, we'll never really know what went down because we can't get in those two's heads, but I can tell you if I was armed and found myself getting my face beaten into the concrete, not knowing what the person would do next, I think I'd certainly feel justified in using a projectile weapon. If somebody is beating you senseless on a dark night, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't assume they'll just leave you after you black out. They may curb stomp you to death, they may take your gun and kill you, they may take your gun and kill somebody else.
I don't think it's a cultural difference between states, I think it's a legal line drawn between homicide vs justifiable homicide.
I'd like to see charting of both, because justifiable homicide is an indicator of danger in an area too. Unsuccessful attempts at violent crime resulting in justifiable homicide by firearm.
That's one obvious problem is you know that any partisan journalist can take justifiable homicides, lump them into the same bucket under gun deaths by murder and use it to reinforce a message of guns = violence. It's disingenuous.
Same thing with other crime. An area could say rapes decreased, even if attempted rapes went up. So it seems successful self-defense literally and figuratively means you won't become a statistic. Which is bad when you want an accurate picture of the safeness of an area.
No buyers agent can say, "Oh yeah this area is really safe, hardly any crime happens to people here, so long as you're open carrying a glock 19 and are an expert in Krav Maga."
I think it is interesting that, with the exception of Hawaii, all of the lowest murder-rate states are northern, mostly rural, and overwhelmingly white. I don't know what conclusions to draw from that, aside from the general trend that these aren't states where there is a lot of ethnic gang violence.