Saturday, April 6, 2013
One Of Those Depressing Reminders Of Where The Problem Is
Gun Watch has a screenshot of a New York Times article about murder in New York City, 2003-2011, and it is a reminder that if you think Law & Order gives an accurate portrayal of the nature of murder there, you are in serious trouble. Of the 4161 murders in that period, the murderers are 61% black, 29% Hispanic, 7% white, and 3% Asian. If you want to do something about murder, you need to examine why the problem is so heavily concentrated in those two groups, and solve that problem. It isn't like white people in New York City have less access to guns than blacks or Hispanics.
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I sometimes hear that the category "Hispanic" appears only on the victim side, never on the perpetrator side. So if a Hispanic kills a Hispanic, that is classified as white on Hispanic. At least this is thoguht to be true of FBI statistics.
ReplyDeleteAny idea if this is true?
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports do not break down by the category Hispanic: only white, black, Asian/Pacific Islanders. They have the data, and on a few occasions in the past, they have done so in special reports. The results are so much in line with New York City's data that for obvious reasons, they do not provide this data on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteMany states which contribute to the Uniform Crime Reports do break down by Hispanic, for both perpetrators and victims. California, does for example.
I would argue that in New York, whites *do* have less access to guns than blacks or hispanics. (And Asians probably even less so.)
ReplyDeleteObtaining a gun in New York is nearly impossible to do legally, therefore obtaining a gun requires knowing someone willing to obtain one for you legally. There are proportionally more criminals of (almost) all sorts in the black and hispanic populations than in the white (and Asian) population. Since people do self-segregate to some extent, the average black person, and the average hispanic person, know more criminals than the average white person or Asian person. The more criminals you know, the likelier it is that you know a criminal who can obtain you a gun.
Therefore, whites have *less* access to guns in New York.