The far-left British tabloid The Guardian has waded back into the gun control debate, showing "Republicans representing cities with a higher murder rate than Chicago" and their refusal to back tough gun laws.
The thing to remember, of course, is that when you see a discussion about "high rates of crime" in the United States, you're really talking about "America has a lot of black people" in it. (You can do a similar evaluation in Canada, though our violent blacks are only out-done by our violent Red Indians)
The Guardian won't tell you this, of course: the comfortable lies of the left is their business, and business is good as long as ignorant lefties continue to succumb to their echo chambers.
The Guardian wants you to think that the problem in these cities are all guns. But in blue I have indicated the "increased share" of blacks in these cities compared with their proportion of the U.S. population (12.61%)
Jackson, Mississippi has a high murder rate. But while Mississippi's black population is 37%, Jackson's black population is a whopping 79.4% black 79.4 is 6.29659 times higher than 12.61, so 6.3 is the "index" for Jackson.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana has a black population of 50.4%, for an index of 4.0. Little Rock, Arkansas is 42.3% black for an index of 3.4. Cincinnati has a surprisingly 44.8% black population giving it a 3.6 index. Dayton is 42.9% black, for an index of 3.4.
You don't have to stick to the Republican-controlled cities, of course, though I did just to mess with The Guardian's writing team of Lois Beckett, Ryan Felton and Aliza Aufrichtig. The Democrat-controlled cities have their own ridiculous indexes. St. Louis, the murder capital of America, is 49.2% black (3.9 index), Detroit is 82.7% black (6.6 index), and NOLA is 60.2% black (4.8). The poster child for violent American blacks, Chicago, is only 32.9% black (index of only 2.6) befitting its position at the bottom of The Guardian's chart. Of course, the inconvenient truths keep piling on: non-violent blacks are exodusing out of the infamous "black belt" of South Chicago.
The city’s violence turned Tierra Winston into a suburbanite. She and her 14-year old son, Tyriek, were constantly worried about their safety in their old neighborhood, Roseland, one of the city’s most economically depressed.
American blacks cause crime. Colby Cosh once noted if you removed blacks from the equation, gun-toting America was no less safe than Canada.
The answer is that if you account for one obvious cultural difference--the larger black population in the United States--the United States of America's murder rate is pretty much the same as ours, despite the huge disparity in handgun ownership. Black Americans are 13% of the U.S. population and commit over half of America's homicides.
Follow that last link and you'll see that, according to the FBI at least, the non-black U.S. population of 244 million committed 5,447 murders in 2001. (That's not counting the statistical outlier of Sept. 11, of course.) The Canadian government doesn't break down its figures by race, but the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics' 2000 figures show 542 homicides in Canada--a typical figure--amongst about 28 million Canadians. Our murder rate for the whole populace is 87% of the rate amongst U.S. non-blacks. If you were to try and establish a non-black Canadian murder rate by removing the negligible number of Canadian blacks from the numerator and the denominator, the resulting rate would certainly be lower than 87%, but not by more than a couple of points.
Far-left British newspaper writers should probably get themselves up to speed on that topic before they feel like lecturing American politicians about their opposition to denying citizens their fundamental freedom to own firearms (a freedom that Britain herself should get up to speed on).
