It's a culture thing all right, Thug Culture/Gang Culture.cb1000rider wrote:I'm certainly not anti-gun, but just for the sake of discussion:evilmercer wrote: It shows statistics proving that with more gun control in Canada, Australia, England, and Whales violent crime and robberies go up and compare the same years to United States and show the declining trend here. The statistics are not just straight numbers a lot are based on per 100,000 people statistics so it is a better comparison when you are comparing the crime of very differently populated and sized countries.
I don't disagree with those statistics. Violent crime and robbery is a subset of total crime. Before I made up my mind, I'd want answer to the following.. And just for the point of making it easy to compare, let's just say US vs UK:
1) How does the murder rate compare in the US vs UK?
2) How many violent crimes were defended by legally owned firearms in the US? (This is an important number to me, as that more crime might have occurred w/o gun ownership)
3) Of murders committed, how many were accomplished by firearms?
My point is that the statistics can be used to support either position. I had a (relatively uneducated on my side) discussion with a Romanian once. Romania has a massive organized crime problem and is - in my view - the cybercrime hub of the world. It's bad locally and on the street. I like to call it the Eastern European New Jersey. He was discussing how bad the violent crime was in the US and how the number of violent gun deaths was massive compared to Romania. I didn't believe him, but I looked it up.
The murder rate in Romania is 2 per 100,000.
The murder rate in the US is 4.8 per 100,000.
Most of those murders are associated with firearms in the USA.
To me, this doesn't prove that it's a "gun problem". It could be a culture thing. It does prove - and you'll find it generally true that the US has a higher murder rate than most "civilized" countries. And most of those murders involve firearms.
Course, you could take away our guns and we'll just find another way to kill each other.. But it's hard to prove that.
Again, I mean this not as an anti-gun point. I post it so that you're still prepared with what the other side is going to say. You'll need to think about how you can respond to these types of statistics.
Illinois has a population of 12.9 million. Statewide murder rate is 5.6 per 100,000 population. Exclude the city of Chicago's 2.7 million and the murders committed there, drops the rate to 3.3 per 100,000. Exclude Chicago and Cook County's combined 5.2 million and those murders committed within them and you arrive at a murder rate of 1.4 per 100,000 population. That rate is comparable to the rates reported by EU member states.
That the murders are committed with a gun instead of a knife, club, fist, boot, poison, automobile or rope isn't the issue.
https://portal.chicagopolice.org/portal ... s/MA11.pdf
http://www.isp.state.il.us/docs/cii/cii ... to_194.pdf
The elephant in the room, that we need to quit ignoring, is the age, race, offender status and gender of both the victims and the perpetrators of murder in our cities.
Age, 80% of murders in Chicago are committed by those between the ages of 17-35.
Race, 95% of murders in Chicago are committed by Black and Latino Americans.
Offender Status, 88% of murderers have prior criminal convictions and arrests. 77% of the victims also have prior convictions and arrests.
Gender, 90% of the murderers are male. 87% of the victims are male.
Chicago's racial demographics;
White, 49%
Black, 32%
Latino, 14%
Asian, 5%
Asians committed 1.5% of murders
Whites committed 3.5% of murders
Asians victims .4%
White victims 4.6%
In conclusion;
Your request for murder statistics based on the instrument used is disingenuous at best, and depending on your motive could be viewed as duplicitous.
Let's have a real conversation about culture, government and crime. Let's find solutions to the crime rates in the inner city. Or we can float around and be shocked and ignore the statistics that actually define America's violent crime rate.
That is how I respond to the "Gun" statistics. How do you?