My Arts Editor and I have noticed a jump in gun-related violence here in Minnesota, but it appears to be nation-wide:
Let’s be honest here: citing raw numbers in a country in which total population grows from year to year is just bad statistics on WaPo’s part. Even more egregriously, not providing this on a per-capita basis strips necessary context[1]. If I do my math properly, it appears to be roughly 6 deaths per 100,000 people – which masks important details such as how much more impacted are minority and lower income communities than high income communities. How about comparisons with other countries?
And then they don’t actually give the 2019 number. Assholes.
But a jump of roughly 28% in gun deaths is at least worthy of concern. WaPo goes on to note:
Researchers say the pandemic probably fueled the increases in several ways. The spread of the coronavirus hampered anti-crime efforts, and the attendant shutdowns compounded unemployment and stress at a time when schools and other community programs were closed or online. They also note the apparent collapse of public confidence in law enforcement that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Covid-19 and the protests over police brutality also led to a surge of firearm sales. In 2020, people purchased about 23 million guns, a 64 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.
And this at a time when, in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) appears to be struggling with morale in the wake of the George Floyd riots and a city council that tried, but failed, to “defund” it in the wake of the George Floyd homicide. Officers have retired or gone on disability in the wake of the riots, and they’re not being replaced at a comparable rate. Here’s MPR News:
There are far fewer police officers patrolling the streets of Minneapolis so far this year than city officials anticipated. Members of a City Council committee Thursday approved $6.4 million for the city’s Police Department to hire dozens more officers this year.
Chief Medaria Arradondo told the committee that 105 officers left the department last year, which is more than double the average attrition rate. And so far this year, 155 officers are on leave and are not available for duty.
Ominously:
“This presents operational challenges for me as chief,” said Arradondo, adding that the department is becoming one-dimensional, meaning officers mostly respond to 911 calls instead of doing what he calls proactive policing.
After all, you want to stop crimes before they start. Right now, they seem to be fighting a losing battle. All the while they are also attending to tasks for which they’re ill-suited such as mental illness calls, which would be better handled by trained responders in those areas, much like the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon.
I have to wonder how many other city police forces are struggling with the same problems.
MEANWHILE … Limbaugh-replacement Erick Erickson is off and running with a tidy little bit of relevant insanity:
Instead of trying to confiscate people’s guns and make it harder to buy them, we should make every one in this country own a gun and know how to use it. Give a federally allocated handgun to every single American. But in order to get the gun, you have to go learn gun safety and how to use it, and when not to use it. Arm every American citizen so that when the shooter goes to the grocery store they know that ten out of ten people in that grocery store are going to have a gun on them. At this point, the left gets hysterical as I bring this up.
I suspect the left begins laughing hysterically. To me, this is the sort of conclusion that comes from bad assumptions. The post is full of them, but I’ll just point out one:
… when the shooter goes to the grocery store they know that ten out of ten people in that grocery store are going to have a gun on them.
Yeah? The assumption here is that the shooter is rationally performing cost/benefit analyses, etc. Are they?
No. Most shooters are young males, and for those of us who follow neurological news, we know that young people’s brains don’t become fully functional until their early twenties at the very best; late twenties is more likely for males. Assuming rationality when most shootings are based impulse or irrational hatreds is insanity writ large.
So the shooting happens nonetheless … those ten armed citizens return fire … from different corners of the store … at whoever happens to be in the direction of the firing … if that can be ascertained …
And the town’s coffin-maker experiences yet another surge of economic activity, just weeks after the town’s gun maker does.
… and the fabric of the town goes to pieces as trust is replaced with guns …
The thing is, I went through a phase of working my way through logic much like Erickson’s (you’ll have to read his post for the full effect) when I was younger. I’m an independent centrist, not a leftist, who used to have a lot of sympathy with the libertarians, so I defended this sort of view myself.
Being a contrarian, though, I eventually dug around at the assumptions of the position and found them to be weak, even crumbling. So that’s why I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Erickson here. His assumptions – or perhaps his appetite for gun manufacturer money, although I assign that a low probability – lead him to awful conclusions.
And he ignores a history in which NRA-endorsed gun control laws didn’t result in horrible slaughters of citizens. He should incorporate that into his thinking.
1 And then there’s this dude in the same WaPo story:
“More than 100 Americans are killed daily by gun violence,” Ronnie Dunn, a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, said, using a figure that includes suicides.
Most people have no idea of the population of the United States, so this guy can be credibly accused by anti-gun control advocates of fear-mongering – thus sabotaging what I presume would be his position in favor of gun control. And my math suggests that’s a result of 365,000 gun violence deaths a year – a number that does not correlate with the presented graph, not even near. Not even subtracting out the estimated suicides. It really wrecks confidence in the WaPo story.
