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Friday, 30 September 2022

[New post] More notes for January

Site logo image camestrosfelapton posted: " Larry Correia's forthcoming book on guns-n-stuff won't be released for a few months still but the probable contents is revealed by other means. A recent Twitter thread has been compiled here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575499318827528197.html and" Camestros Felapton

More notes for January

camestrosfelapton

Oct 1

Larry Correia's forthcoming book on guns-n-stuff won't be released for a few months still but the probable contents is revealed by other means. A recent Twitter thread has been compiled here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575499318827528197.html and while it is somewhat of an incoherent rant, it does provide a glimpse into forthcoming topics.

"For my upcoming gun rights book I have a chapter that looks at crime and murder rates. Basically America doesn't have a murder problem, big dumb blue cities have a wacky murder problem. Most of America is pretty chill."

The Twitter rant was prompted by supporters of the Biden presidency pointing out the high murder rates in states which had been won by Trump. Correia's narrow point is that the highest murder rates in those "Trump states" occurs in the bigger cities in those states which, in turn, have higher proportions of Democratic party voters. The broader point being that the high murder rate of the US, in general, is an urban thing, not a rural thing. This fits into his argument about guns because those cities also are more likely to have relatively stricter gun control than rural areas.

Firstly it is worth conceding that urban areas typically have more crime per capita than rural areas. In fact that is even more true than Correia is stating because it is true in the UK and in Australia and in Canada and in France and as far as I know probably everywhere. Urban areas have a higher density of people, meaning there are more interactions between people, as well as many other factors that contribute not just to levels of crime but also to reported levels of crime. This is true in countries with strict policing and in countries with right-wing governments having strong political control over cities as well as countries with softer policing and more left-leaning control of cities. The US isn't atypical in that regard but it is atypical in its murder rates for Western democracy.

For example, the big, dense, multicultural and often chaotic metropolis of London (UK) had a murder rate in 2020 of 1.4 murders per 100 thousand people in 2020[1]. Whereas the state of Utah (US) had a murder rate in 2020 of 3.1 murders per 100 thousand people in 2020[2]. Still, even though Utah as a whole is much less densely populated than London, the murders that contribute to the murder rate are in more urban areas[3]. Still, Correia has a point of sorts here even if he isn't articulating it well — the relationships that there appear to be between gun ownership or support for the GOP and murder rates appear and disappear as we look at different geographic levels.

Correia goes on to claim:

"Big blue cities are shitty and getting worse every day, but I know, let's turn every street into hobo camps, encourage street shitting and free heroin, and let all the rapists free and stuff will magically improve! It's the power of social justice! Democrats are the only motherfuckers dumb enough to be all ACAB, Defund The Police, then they act all shocked and baffled when criminals do more crime.
Duh, you fucking dummies. What a crazy turn of events that nobody could have seen coming! America's crime rate has been going down for 30 years. Until 2020, and the Great National Democrat Temper Tantrum, and all of a sudden we ditch all that progress and it's 1993 level of murders again."

Murder rates really did spike in 2020[4] but Correia's suggested causes make very little sense compared to actual data. Firstly, consider the trends earlier in this century where levels of violent crime had declined. Serious violent crime really had been in decline for many years but that had occurred in both rural AND urban areas[5] in fact the decline was greater in urban areas than rural areas in the period 1995-2015.

Just as that decline occurred across the rural/urban divide, so the recent surge in the US also was mirrored in both urban and rural areas. According to the very-much-not left-wing Wall Street Journal:

"Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the largest rural increase since the agency began tracking such data in 1999. The CDC considers counties rural if they are located outside metropolitan areas defined by the federal government. The rise came close to the 30% spike in homicide rates in metropolitan areas in 2020."

[6]

Of course, neither all-cops-are-bastards nor defunding the police have actually been Democratic Party policy — Correia is simply conflating protestors on the left with Democrats in state and city government. However, even if we assume simply calls to defund the police (without any actual reduction in funding) caused a rise in violent crimes in cities, the parallel rise in rural areas would be left unexplained. The covid-19 pandemic seems the most likely answer but similar spikes are not seen consistently internationally[7]. Either way, the spike was unlikely to be due to ACAB as a slogan, which is a shame because then presumably we could make murder rates go in the opposite direction by chanting nice things about the police, which I'd be willing to do if it magically saved lives[8].

While there have been broad parallel trends in violent crime across America, there have also been some cases of rural America bucking downward trends in recent years. There are multiple factors in play but one of them is, surprise-surprise, guns:

"As gun violence continues to fuel violent crime across the nation, some conservative politicians are not only refusing to support commonsense gun violence prevention measures but are also actively rolling back gun laws that help make our communities safer. Many of these same elected officials continue to perpetuate the narrative that gun violence is only a problem in urban, Democrat-led cities, and media outlets are skewing the public perspective by heavily focusing on gun violence in cities such as Chicago. The truth, however, is that rural communities—particularly in red states—have increasingly faced levels of gun violence that match or outpace urban areas."

[9]

According to that same article from"2016 to 2020, 13 of the 20 U.S. counties with the most gun homicides per capita were rural" and of those 80% "are in states that received an "F" grade for their weak gun laws".

  • [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London#Homicide
  • [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate
  • [3] https://housegrail.com/most-dangerous-cities-in-utah/
  • [4] https://www.vox.com/22344713/murder-violent-crime-spike-surge-2020-covid-19-coronavirus
  • [5] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/info_flyers/fact_sheets/2018NCVRW_UrbanRural_508_QC.pdf
  • [6] https://archive.ph/yrV1W#selection-325.0-329.85
  • [7] https://theconversation.com/homicide-is-on-the-rise-in-australia-should-we-be-concerned-178320 Australian homicide rates went up, the UK didn't
  • [8] it won't so no need to start practising "all cops are very nice people"
  • [9] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun-violence-in-rural-america/
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