Is It Really the Guns?

Ever notice how some mass shootings in America vanish from the left-elite’s radar almost immediately, while others they can’t stop yammering about for years. Heck, Joe Biden made a huge song and dance about passing the “Emmett Till Antilynching Act”, even though Emmett Till was murdered nearly 70 years ago and there hasn’t been an actual lynching in America for over 40 years.

The left also still regularly intone Brenton Tarrant, Anders Breivik and Dylann Roof – but when was the last time you heard them mention the Beltway Snipers? David Ray Conley? The Waukesha Christmas Parade attackers?

Notably, Tarrant, Breivik and Roof are all white. The other three mentioned (four, given there were two Beltway Snipers) are all black.

The Super Bowl parade shooting last week in Kansas City is following the same pattern. In particular, Ann Coulter’s Law of Mass Shootings:

Ann devised her insight back in 2015 after two Muslim terrorists of Pakistani origin murdered 14 at a government office in San Bernardino:

Not only have media and authorities conspicuously conspired not to tell anyone the race of the shooters, but pictures and video are being carefully blurred.

The race of the two youths arrested for the Kansas City shooting are still being covered up on the excuse that they are under 18. From the New York Post:

“Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas accused Missouri Gov Mike Parson of using a racial ‘dog whistle’ when referring to the suspected shooters at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade as ‘thugs’. …

“I’ve seen this dog whistle time and again. There’s this kind of giant conservative theory on social media now that the reason these mug shots haven’t been shown is because the purported defendants are black, and if it were a white defendant we would have just shown them. That is absolutely preposterous. There are protections to juveniles,” he added.

Tell that to Kyle Rittenhouse.

Oh, and the suspects are 23 and 18, respectively.

In case you hadn’t already guessed, by the way, Lucas is black; Parson is not.

One could be forgiven for suspecting that the real reason for such careful cherry-picking is that, otherwise, Americans might start asking: Does America have a gun problem? Or a black gun problem?

Banning the release of mug shots of juvenile murderers helps hide the horrifying extent of black gun crime because of the immense racial differential in shootings among teens. According to CDC data on the cause of deaths, in 2020–2022 black 17-year-olds were 24 times as likely per capita to die by firearm homicide as white 17-year-olds.

In mass shootings, as in so many other social matters, media attention tends to hyper-focus on the rare-but-spectacular and ignore the routine which actually accounts for the vast bulk of mass shooting deaths.

A mass shooting, it must be remembered is defined by law in the US (the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012), as “three or more killings in a single incident”. Which covers everything from a Christchurch-style attack to a drive-by in a black neighbourhood. Guess which is far, far most common?

In the infamous but (fortunately) still fairly rare Columbine-style shootings, the shooter has decided that he’s never coming home, that he’ll die or go to prison for life. So, he sticks around to finish off the wounded. Thus, there wind up more dead than wounded.

A lot more dead.

In contrast, in the kind of mass shooting that happens five or 10 times per week at social events attended by large numbers of blacks, like the Super Bowl parade, numerous wounded survive because the shooter (or, often, shooters) aren’t suicidal. As soon as they hear sirens, they run.

The other notable difference is white mass shooters seem to tend toward rifles, usually bought legally. But blacks much prefer handguns which are more likely to be black market (no pun intended), which is why ‘gun free’ cities like Chicago have such staggering numbers of firearm deaths. The illegal handguns account for the vast bulk of mass shooting deaths.

What’s more promising for deterring mass shootings like Kansas City’s is point-of-use gun control: Discourage lowlifes from bringing their illegal handgun with them when out walking or driving. New York City had impressive success at changing the criminal culture toward leaving guns at home. Most of the more-wounded-than-dead mass shootings aren’t the result of some brilliant Michael Corleone-level strategic plan, but are instead due to a moron getting dissed when he happens to have his Glock tucked in his waistband and starts blasting away in the general direction of his rival, plus all the partygoers standing around eating ribs in the background.

On the other hand, my vague impression is that more-dead-than-wounded mass shooters tend to be the type of people who have no friends, so they don’t know a guy who knows a guy who can get them a hot gun. Therefore, they need to buy their guns legally. Thus, point-of-sale gun control aimed at slowing the insane or suicidal when trying to buy guns might have some positive effect.

And go a long way to reducing America’s rate of gun homicides, particularly the type of mass shootings that by far account for mass shooting victims.

The shooting in Kansas City got me thinking about whether Missouri cities are really as shooty as they seem.

So, I went to my usual source, the CDC’s WONDER Multiple Cause of Death database, and looked at victimizations by homicide in 2018–2022 for 55 “Large Central Metro” counties, such as Los Angeles, Cook, Maricopa, Harris, and so forth […]

The highest homicide death rate per capita was in the county home to St Louis, followed by Baltimore, New Orleans, Memphis, Philadelphia, Birmingham, Washington, DC, and Kansas City.

The usual questions: Are these blue counties or red counties? Are they in blue states or red states? Well, almost all big cities and most big counties are run by Democrats, while states are more mixed.

But what really jumps out from graphing the data is that high homicide rates in urban counties correlate with high black shares of the population, at a spectacular correlation coefficient of r = 0.87.

That’s the kind of correlation you seldom see in the social sciences.

Takimag

And you will never see this mentioned in the mainstream media, who, for all their palaver about “Black Lives Matter”, conspire to cover up one of the biggest causes of black deaths in the US.