Sunday, June 19, 2022

In the New York Times?

6/16/22 New York Times (behind a pay wall, open in an incognito tab to get around it):

"Mass shootings account for less than 4 percent of gun homicides in a typical year, and most gun violence in the U.S. takes a different form. So I went to Chicago, where shootings are a daily occurrence in some areas, to see what more-typical gun violence looks like....

This is what daily life looks like for many Black Chicagoans. Across the city, the murder rate for Black people is higher than it was from the 1980s through the 1990s — a violent period that drove a nationwide push for mass incarceration. Black Chicagoans are nearly 40 times more likely to be shot to death than their white peers, according to an analysis by the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

The violence is highly concentrated: Just 4 percent of city blocks account for the majority of shootings across Chicago, according to the Crime Lab.

Similar disparities exist across America. Black and brown neighborhoods suffer higher rates of poverty, and violence concentrates around poverty. The violence is so intensive that a few neighborhoods, blocks or people often drive most of the shootings and murders in a city or county. And this is true in both urban and rural areas, said Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton."

The article points out that most Americans, even in places as bad as Chicago have little connection or concern about the real problems of gun violence.

It also argues that poverty drives the crime but then admits violence causes disinvestment which then causes poverty which then causes violence.   

I believe this is why the media give so much attention to the unusual incidents that have some connection to white Americans as part of their gun banning goals.  Gun bans are the goal; reducing the tragedies that are the norm is racism.


1 comment:

  1. At the risk of sounding racist, In chicago the crime is spreading away from the "bad" neighborhoods to the more prosperous ones, but the perpetrators of the crimes are the same. It may be that once it was only a few blocks or a small area, but that hasn't been true for the past 5 or more years in Chicago. THe area is larger that just a few blocks, and it is growing ever larger.
    Having said that, the race of the majority of the perpetrators of the crimes remains the same

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