Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I have many questions about these stats. For example, how do we know that the various nations are using the same definition of ‘homicide’? Do some countries include suicides in their homicide stats? And what about police shooting criminals during a crime— is that considered a gun-related homicide? If so, wouldn’t that skew stats for nations where the police are often unarmed? Those are just a few of the many questions I have about these figures being tossed around.
I always take our own statistics with a boulder of salt when it comes to crime and most nations tend to be worse.
As Disraeli (or was it Mark Twain?) said: “there are lies, there are damned lies and there are statistics.”
Homicide rates prior to 2014 were higher in the United States than is common in western Europe (about 4x higher) and people are more likely to use guns when killing. What they don’t tell you is that at that time about 70% of the homicides in the United States were committed by blacks and mestizos, populations thin on the ground in western Europe. In the last eight years, Democratic politicians have grown antagonistic to law enforcement and there has been a horrendous increase in the frequency of violent crime, nearly all of it in core cities run by Democrats.
Note, the people peddling these statistics aren’t going to tell you that before they wrecked core city law enforcement, the difference in robbery rates between the United States on the one hand and England and Wales on the other was on the order of 2:1, nor are they going to tell you that burglary and (especially) auto theft were far more frequent in England and Wales than they were in the U.S.
They’re also not going to admit that they themselves are demonstrably hostile to effective law enforcement strategies and are trying to still the blame for core city crime with suburban, exurban, and rural populations who own many guns but commit few homicides.
Good survey, Art. I also wonder how many of the “homicides” were actually suicides, as I have read in other places that suicides make up a significant percentage of the “gun violence” about which the Dems are always caterwauling.
If we exclude Chicago, what would it be?
I looked into this a while back, and the stats do reflect reality. The US murder rate among whites was 4-5x the average European rate, and the US black rate 4-5x higher than that. The one thing I couldn’t come up with was a breakdown of the European rates by race.
Been doing some poking around on the stats for the USA, and according to the CDC, almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms defensively—i.e., to deter criminals— between 500k and 3 million times each year.
In addition, those instances where a criminal is shot by a person defending himself are still considered ‘gun-related violence/homicide’ in the CDC statistics.
It’s still unclear to me if the CDC considers suicides where a gun is used in its ‘gun-related homicide / violence’ stats.
The US murder rate among whites was 4-5x the average European rate,
It isn’t.
Now let’s see the same results for acid attacks.
Art – I said roughly, and old data, and I should have said Western Europe.
I went to the website for Everytownreaserch. org, the source for these stats about gun violence in the tweet from “House Judiciary Dems”. The organization’s website offers articles with such titles as “Armed and Dangerous: How the Gun Lobby Enshrines Guns as a Tool of the Extreme Right” and “The Role of Guns and Armed Extremism in the Attack on the US Capitol”. I’m gonna go out on a limb and conclude that this group is decidedly anti-2nd Amendment and just maybe less than impartial and apolitical in the handling of statistics.
/ sarc.
Art – I said roughly, and old data, and I should have said Western Europe.
You’re still wrong.
You’re still wrong
You misspelled “deceptive” here.
On Australian news (as far removed as you can get for bias): Man shoots at people from the back of a scooter in Queens NY- kills an elderly man and wounds others. Man holds up a teddy bear store in Phoenix AZ- with kids forced to hold up their hands. One was black, the latter (probably) hispanic. Who would think…