1/9/17 Guardian. While a Labour Party paper, they often do great journalism. This article shows how gun murder in the U.S. is highly concentrated by city, by race, and even more importantly by poor education and poverty (hence the racial concentration.
Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns, according to a new geographic analysis by the Guardian, even though they contain less than a quarter of the nation’s population....
Even within those cities, violence is further concentrated in the tiny neighborhood areas that saw two or more gun homicide incidents in a single year.
Four and a half million Americans live in areas of these cities with the highest numbers of gun homicide, which are marked by intense poverty, low levels of education, and racial segregation. Geographically, these neighborhood areas are small: a total of about 1,200 neighborhood census tracts, which, laid side by side, would fit into an area just 42 miles wide by 42 miles long.
The problem they face is devastating. Though these neighborhood areas contain just 1.5% of the country’s population, they saw 26% of America’s total gun homicides.
Hmm. Let's assume that the 1.5% of the population in these highest-homicide-rate areas is black. That represents about 1/8 of the black 12% of the total population. Blacks are about half of all homicides, so 26% is about half of all black homicides. Thus these area are four times as violent as the rest of black America (and (26%/1.5%)/(50%/88%) = about 30X as violent as non-black America).
ReplyDeleteAnd probably an equally high number of non-gun homicides are concentrated within those same communities.
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