MASSIVE Elementary School Shooting in CT *12-24 Maybe be dead

[gturner]

The US has a lower murder rate than all but a handful of countries in the Western Hemisphere, which would be:

Martinique, Canada, Chile, and Argentina.

Countries in the Western Hemisphere with higher murder rates (and almost invariably much tighter gun laws) would include:

Greenland, Venezuela, Uruguay, Suriname, Peru, Paraguay, Guyana, French Guina, Equador, Columbia, Brazil, Bolivia, Bermuda, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, Costa Rica, the US Virgin Islands, Cuba, Trinidad, Montserrat, Jaimaca, Guadelupe, Haiti, Grenada, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, St Lucia, St Kitts, St Vincent, the Caymans, Barbados, Antigua, Anguilla, and the British Virgin Islands.

We also have a lower homicide rate than Russia, the Ukraine, Moldova, and several other states in Eastern Europe, and also lower than some of the Baltic states. Of the contries in Western, Northern, and Southern Europe, most have looser restrictions than Connecticut, Maryland, Chicago, or New York, and some have looser restrictions than our gun friendly states. In Switzerland, assault rifles are commonly found in bedroom closests.

US states that demographically look like Europe also have Europe's low homicide rates, or lower, even though they have staggeringly high gun possession rates, like Montana, the Dakotas, Iowa, Oregon, and Vermont, all of which are way more armed than Texas. If you punch US gun possession rates and homicide rates by state into a spreadsheet and plot it, you don't get a line, you get a random scatter and Louisianna. Hawaii and Rhode Island have very few guns and low homicides, Montana and many others have lots of guns and have very low homicides, virtually identical to Switzerland or Austria.

I don't think you're fools. I know you are. Cops and gun owners have spent the last week thinking they're arguing with five-year old girls.

A) You're never going to get any meaningful legislation passed, because Democrats long gave up on gun control because it was costing them key demographics that they need to win, like blue collar union voters.

B) The legislation you tried in the past not only made guns much better, but vastly increased sales.

C) The restriction put in place on large capacity magazines resulted in the sale of roughly one hundred million extra large capacity magazines. They're disposable, so we stocked up. Now we have about a centuries worth on hand. We only have tens of billions of bullets.

D) The Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have the Constitutional right to carry useful, commonly owned arms in a working state, without any onerous provisions or costs. That overturned even existing gun bans in cities like DC and Chicago, and will apply to the states, as well. Legal scholars have already weighed in on this.

And even if you did manage to amend the Constitution, pass a ban, get cops to even try to enforce it (cops often refuse to take really good guns at buy backs), and then somehow convince gun owners to go along with it, we'll still have higher murder rates than Western Europe, possibly much, much higher than present.

[gturner]

MacLeod wrote:

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According to the article on Wikipedia White American comes in at 72% white American not 63% as you state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_an..._United_States

Read it again for comprehension. 72 percent includes hispanics. You have to get all the way to the end of the paragraph.

[gturner]

MacLeod wrote:

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^Remember as well those graphs show total murders in that year. So one would expect when the population was smaller in 1960 to have fewer murders.

Their murder rate ended up four times higher by the 90's. Not even the Brits breed that fast.

For that increase, they can and do largely blame the spread of US style gang culture to their shores. Apparently the decrease since then might be from our romantic comedies or something.

[MacLeod]

gturner wrote:

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The US has a lower murder rate than all but a handful of countries in the Western Hemisphere, which would be:


Martinique, Canada, Chile, and Argentina.

Last I checked these countries had lower murder rates per capita than the US and also fall within the Western Hemisphere

The UK
Ireland
Spain
Portugal,
Parts are France are also with the Western Hemisphere Algeria also has parts within the Western Hemisphere
Morocco

So the list is longer than you make it out to be.

And out of the countires that are considered the developed world the US ranks at number 1 in murder in rate.

[beamMe]

MacLeod wrote:

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Last I checked these countries had lower murder rates per capita than the US and also fall within the Western Hemisphere

The UK
Ireland
Spain
Portugal,
Parts are France are also with the Western Hemisphere Algeria also has parts within the Western Hemisphere
Morocco

So the list is longer than you make it out to be.

And out of the countires that are considered the developed world the US ranks at number 1 in murder in rate.

Don't confuse him so. He's putting so much effort into spinning his yarn.

[beamMe]

gturner wrote:

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Their murder rate ended up four times higher by the 90's.

This is also false.

[Miss Chicken]

gturner wrote:

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Read it again for comprehension. 72 percent includes hispanics. You have to get all the way to the end of the paragraph.

Well many Hispanics are white so they at least should be included in the 72%.

Just looked up the figures - 53% of Hispanics in the USA are white.

[gturner]

beamMe wrote:

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This is also false.

Oops. You're right. It didn't go from around 250 in 1960 to over a thousand until the early 2000's.

Good catch.

[gturner]

MacLeod wrote:

---

Last I checked these countries had lower murder rates per capita than the US and also fall within the Western Hemisphere

The UK
Ireland
Spain
Portugal,
Parts are France are also with the Western Hemisphere Algeria also has parts within the Western Hemisphere
Morocco

So the list is longer than you make it out to be.

In political discussions, the Western Hemisphere almost always excludes old world countries. Sometimes it's even defined to start at 20 longitude for clarity, though it really should be smaller than a half-sphere for that to work out right.

But if you do include those countries, the US would rank about 12th lowest out of around 40 countries.

And out of the countires that are considered the developed world the US ranks at number 1 in murder in rate.

Depending on which list you go by, I don't think we're ever at the top. Which list are you using? OECD?

[gturner]

Miss Chicken wrote:

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Well many Hispanics are white so they at least should be included in the 72%.

Just looked up the figures - 53% of Hispanics in the USA are white.

That would get into a long discussion of how the whole category doesn't make a lick of sense.

In some department of the US government, the Spanish aren't hispanic but a Brazilian or a British Lord from Belize is, and in some departments they would be considered that even if they moved to non-hispanic Spain. Jessica Alba says she's not hispanic, but says Cameron Diaz is. As you can guess, some of the Census data is going to be garbage.

[beamMe]

gturner wrote:

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Oops. You're right. It didn't go from around 250 in 1960 to over a thousand until the early 2000's.

Good catch.

Okay, I was wrong. The numbers where higher ten years ago.

It was around 300 in the early 1960s and is now at 550 in England and Wales.

Did England loosen gun regulations in the last ten years?

[Miss Chicken]

At least on the US Census people are self-identifying their race which probably is more accurate than any definition you might subscribe to.

When Jessica Alba says she isn't Hispanic, and Cameron Diaz says she is they are talking about their ethnicity not their race.


BTW of the 36 OECD countries the USA has the 5th worse murder rate (5 oer 100,000) - the four countries that have a higher murder rate are

Brazil 22.7 per 100,000
Mexico 19 per 100,000
Russia 11.2 per 100,000
Estonia 5.2 per 100,000

The next highest is Chile with 3.7 per 100,000

[Rincewiend]

gturner wrote:

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Read it again for comprehension. 72 percent includes hispanics. You have to get all the way to the end of the paragraph.

It's that idiotic One Drop rule, isn't it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

[Locutus of Bored]

gturner wrote:

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No, you didn't. I said they were banned about 90 years ago, and you refuted it with their current law. If I said the US banned alcohol 90 years ago, would you refute it by pointing to a modern beer commercial and say "See, no they didn't."

That is indeed when you said it began, but you also said that the ban lasted to the PRESENT DAY, and used it as an argument against banning guns in the PRESENT DAY because that allegedly leads to higher murder rates. Trying to limit it to a temporary measure undertaken in the days of Lenin and Stalin was just the way you moved the goalposts after I showed that your total gun ban in Russia today claim was bullshit. It's like you're completely unaware of the existence of a search function and think your lies will continue to go unnoticed.

gturner wrote:

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Russia banned them and got a murder rate ten times that of Poland, plus a whole Youtube genre of traffic confrontations where everyone piles out with sledgehammers and baseball bats, in a country where they don't even play baseball.

That must have been great Russian YouTube of 90 years ago, right Chekov?

gturner wrote:

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Russia hasn't allowed civilian gun ownership since the 1920's and has twice our murder rate.

"Since the 1920s" and still continuing, and quoting modern day murder statistics.

gturner wrote:

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No, I accept guns because they stop a lot of murders. As pointed out above, with guns we have about a fourth of Russia's homicide rate, almost none of which involves a gun.

gturner wrote:

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We also have a lower homicide rate than Russia

Again reiterating the point that fewer/no guns = higher murder rates in the present day using Russia as an example.

By the way, also take note of the fluctuating murder rate between Russia and the US from one quote to the next. Sometimes it's twice as high, sometimes it's four times as high. You can't even keep your numbers straight from one post to the next. It's almost as if you're just making stuff up as you go along.

I don't think you're fools. I know you are. Cops and gun owners have spent the last week thinking they're arguing with five-year old girls.

Cut this shit out.

[gturner]

No, no loosening, but apparently the shift is due to a change in intimate/spouse murder. Those are most often committed by hands, knives, and blunt instruments, and probably form a sort of baseline homicide rate. That rate has obviously been much lower in the past, or else many murders were going undetected (pillows, poison, blaming it on a staircase fall?)

The DOJ and UK homicide stats get broken down into relationship, method, etc, so it might be interesting to see if something seems like it was missing, such as a jump in a particular type of homicide as a particular new forensic method or focus was introduced, such as getting more people to report abuse.

Sometimes you find interesting things in crime statistics, if you bother to dig into them *looks at room and coughs*. A few years ago some US police departments were curious as to why they were personally familiar with so many homicide victims. Baltimore cops were surprised that 91 percent of their victims also had long lists of prior arrests for violent crimes. Other cities checked, and generally 75 to 90 percent of the homicide victims really didn't belong on the streets, usually having about a dozen priors and apparently engaged in either turf battles, drug disputes, or previous homicides and assaults.

Unlike Western Euope, the US still includes what you might consider as ongoing, small scale (and large scale) crime wars, which includes something quite close to a feuding or dueling culture. In Europe, Appalachia, and the Old West, that had to basically burn itself out, though there's a lot of thought, and a whole lot of ink, digging into the causes and potential remedies.

Our current approach is to maintain a prison population that outnumbers Latvia, with all of Norway on parole or probation. Violent behavior usually peters out as people get older, and the biggest correlation is being a young male in an honor culture, such as Shakespeare's Romeo (period accounts bear that out. Most rapier deaths were teens).

The UK numbers have almost nothing to do with guns (they didn't have much of a homicide problem even before they cracked down on guns, and used to have a fanastically high murder rate with knives when King James was on the throne), but they did see a rise when UK teens got into US gang style coolness. Tiny changes in young male behavior completely dominate murder rates, because that demographic in the US is 20 to 300 homicides per 100,000, rates you can hit without any guns at all if teens decide that knife fighting is cool and manly, as Italians did up through the early 20th century.