by Handwaving Freakoutery
Repeatedly in the press, we see “it’s the guns, it’s the guns, it’s the guns” as the explanation for homicide in the United States, but this rhetoric only serves to obscure the actual homicide problem. I do not believe that black Americans are more inherently violent than any other group of Americans, but I do believe the country at large, particularly its white liberal faction, needs to come to grips with what’s going on in the black community before anything can be fixed. As we go through this deep dive, we will discover the mathematical key to solving the murder problem in the United States lies not in gun control, nor even in socioeconomics, but rather in repairing the family unit across all demographics.
As is often the case on HWFO, we are going to begin with mathematics, and attempt to replicate this entirely unsourced graph I saw on Twitter yesterday:
We begin by picking a year. I’m going to pick 2019 for several reasons. First, it was the last good year the FBI has data on, because they changed their data collection scheme in 2020 to make it so burdensome that half the police agencies in the country stopped giving them data. Second, 2020 was an outlier year, with the Floyd riots, “defund the police,” and “all cops are bastards” leading to a reduction in policing and a commensurate crime spike. Third, the residual effects of all that awful 2020 behavior have not abated, so 2019 is the last best year for an honest comparison.
Expanded Homicide Data Table 6 from the FBI website gives us our starting point. Caveats – this table only includes cases where some racial data was known by law enforcement, so if a homicide occurs where the FBI has no information about offender or victim it’s excluded from the table. It’s also only of single victim / single offender incidents, which would exclude multiple victim shootings. Because of those two things, we’re going to have to do some careful extrapolation.
Table 6 has 6,578 homicides which fit the criteria for inclusion. If we presume the ratios exhibited in this table extrapolate to the total sample of 16,425 US murders in 2019 and extrapolate, this is what we get:
This is not the exact number from the mysterious Twitter graph, but it’s curiously close. If we use 2019 numbers to replicate the Twitter graph’s nation sample, we get this:
It looks to me as if the chart I raked from Twitter is not accurate, but it’s similar. It seems that chart probably took homicide rates for other countries from the 1990s and rates for the USA from around 2014 as a way to cook the numbers. But the difference between the US white homicide rate and US black and Latino homicide rates is tremendously stark.
A broader bar graph, including not only some representative countries but also regions of the world, looks like this:
The US white murder rate is comparable to that of the World Bank High Income nations. The US Latino murder rate is comparable to that of the World Bank Lower Middle Income Nations. The US black murder rate is double the World Bank Lower Income nations and also more than double Africa. But as high as it is, it doesn’t approach the murder rate in most of the rest of the western hemisphere to the south of the USA. Mexico is worse than Black America, Brazil is worse than Mexico, and El Salvador is the nuttiest war zone of them all, almost tripling Black America.
For reference, here’s the World Bank Income Classification Map:
Further, we know that murder rate does not correlate in any way with gun ownership rate by race in the United States, because black folks own the fewest guns.
What do we take away from this, in convenient 280 character Twitter worthy snippets?
- If US black and Latino murder rates were the same as US white murder rates, then the United States would have the same murder rate as our economic peer nations even with 400 million guns in circulation,
- Whites own more guns per capita than black folks or Latinos and there’s an inverse correlation between ownership and murder across those demographics, so “it’s the guns” is not explanatory for the murder rate differential in these populations,
- The racist hot-take of “it’s genetic” is also not explanatory, because US black Americans more than double the sub-Saharan Africa murder rate, and Latin America south of the border is almost six times more murderous than the Latinos here.
It’s not the guns. It’s also not the genetics. So what is it?
Unfortunately, it’s not the economics either, at least not in the United States.
If we take the very crude and direct method, we do see that murder rate falls as average income rises in the United States, but the relationship is steeply nonlinear and we only have three data points.
You’re going to have a very hard time convincing me that a class of folks in the USA who only make $25,000 per year are going to have a murder rate of 155, so the crude analysis fails. Thankfully, Random Critical Analysis did a lot of this heavy lifting for us in 2015, by analyzing county level data:
He states, after presenting dozens of similar graphs to cover every possible economic marker available:
By now I think it should be pretty clear that the economic conditions of each group are not particularly strong predictors of their victimization rates and that they certainly don’t come close to closing the white-black gap. Even poor “white” counties have homicide rates quite a bit lower than affluent “black” counties with low poverty rates.
I’d also note, after perusing these graphs in some detail, that white and Latino homicide rates tend to converge as the areas get poorer. So what is it? He identifies one major factor on regression analysis which ties all three of these groups together.
This is your money graph, from the Random Critical Analysis research:
Great study, but it fails to take into account one critical element. Blacks do, of course, have a higher percentage in poverty. Single parent families have a lot to do with that, but poverty has a lot to do with single parent families, too. In any event, males growing up without a father leads to discipline problems, which can lead to crime. It doesn’t have anything to do with blacks being predisposed to be criminals. But, their situation makes that more likely.
Now, add to that Democrats feeding aggrieved, poverty-stricken blacks a steady diet of propaganda that they are victims and those victimizing them is the evil white man. This keeps male black youths in a constant state of outrage and frustration. They won’t even try to get an education or a good job because, what’s the point? Whitey will just take it from them anyway.
Unless they strike first.
Democrats do this to try to keep their black voting bloc in tact (though Democrat policies is the primary cause of the plight of the blacks) but what it does is create a mass of outraged victims looking for revenge wherever they can find it.