Alphecca

Actually, it would be the other way around. Whites are more likely to own guns, and thus should have higher homicide rates.

Funny thing that no one wants to talk about is that where you ancestors come from largely determines your risk of being a homicide victim. If your ancestors came from Europe, you will have a roughly similar chance of being murdered as your distant cousins across the pond. Ditto if your ancestors come from Africa, or Asia (Americans of Japanese descent have some of the lowest homicide rates in the US, just above the homicide rate in Japan itself).

Which leads me to conclude that homicide is culturally driven, not driven by external factors like the availability of guns.

Commented a while back in simillar vein:

British Govt sponsored research in the mid 90's on crime and punishment found that both sides of the pond, blacks were 15 times more likely (per 100 000) to be in jail, compared to whites. I did some simple maths and the greater proportion of afro carribean decent in the US pretty much accounted for the higher proportion of the poulation in jail.

If we are looking at firearms ownership VS firearms misuse;

Legal firearms owners tend to be; middle aged or older, White, Rural, middle class or above

those involved (and most freq victims of firearms abuse) tend to be young, black or hispanic, urban and poor

The common only factors are Male and guns, although guns would be by deffinition, as we are talking about them.....

OK, we can postulate on causes, and like everyone else, I have pet theories. Mine are about damaged societies and self destructive behaviour being perpetuated, long after the original reasons for it have ceased to apply.

Let us look at what we can control for:
Switzerland has higher firearms ownership and availability than the US ever had or has, but without the violence, so I think we can eliminate guns as a causal factor.

Poverty
We can point to lots of countries with greater poverty but not the violence

Inequality
difficult, but there are places with less inequality and more violence and vice versa.

America
Small town america is one of the safest settings on the planet

Race
This is thorny, very thorny, as most black populations have had a seriously rough past, whether of their own or someone else's causing. simmilarly for many of your Latino communities (Mexico, Guatemala etc are still pretty genocidal towards their indiginous rural populations). My personal pref is to ignore race itself and to look at that groups experience.

My personal pet is the Irish drinking culture. The Irish are now about the most economically successful in europe, but still the drinking culture is one of heading to blind oblivion, Why? they've been independant of britain for 85 + years, but i suspect that the behaviour of seeking oblivion has long outlasted its' purpose. Maybe the same for the out and out violence seen with greater frequency in the black community?

As I've noted several times previously, if homicide is concentrated in a specific demographic - in this case, young black inner-city males - then doesn't this suggest to anybody that there ought to be a way to attack that specific problem? Less than 13% of the entire population represents 47% of all victims of homicide, yet "gun control" - which essentially is directed at disarming all legal gun owners - is the preferred method of addressing this egregious situation?

Doesn't this strike anyone besides me as ludicrous?

Or, alternatively, evil?

"Here I will briefly summarize the findings. Asians and Africans consistently aggregate at opposite ends, with Europeans intermediate, on a continuum that includes over 60 anatomical and social variables. These 60 variables include brain size, intelligence, sexual habits, fertility, personality, temperament, speed of maturation, and longevity. If race were an arbitrary, socially-constructed concept, devoid of all biological meaning, such consistent relationships would not exist."
--Philippe Rushton, arguing aginst the idea that race "has no validity as a biological concept when applied to man."
http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/jpr01.html

This man's research into the differences between the races, and not just socio-economic differences, but tangible physical/mental differences, are eye-opening and uncomfortable. Therefore, they are completely ignored or, at best, derided.
DAL357

Nice to know that my hometown newspaper is holding to their journalistic standards.

What gets me is that central Indiana is largely a conservative area; but the Star seems to be really trying hard to be like the Boston Globe.

Oh well, it's still better than Nuvo.

It wonders me..........

How many of these poor benighted male youth of dusky hue who are being murdered at such a disproportunate rate have either a stable male role model in their lives, or are members of criminal gangs?

Hmmmm?

Be very, very careful when anyone tries to link intelligence to race:

One of the first "intelligence tests" tried in the US (i forget the refs for name and date but can get them quick enough, my wife is a cognitive psychologist)gave results that exactly brought out the expectations of the day:

Those of English descent came out well while those of other origins faired poorly, with black and Irish origin coming out particularly poorly.

What the test, and every single one since was showing was culturally dependant. My good lady maintains that there is no such thing as none culturally dependant test.

The comparability between different tests is also very suspect, with mensa's tests scoring far higher than anyone else's (perhaps understandable, they want members).

Where testing has a little value is where people with severe problems need to be assessed, though even there, if someone has a problem, you can tell without at test!

Ok, back to the subject:
superficially, racial profiling would seem to offer a way forward, but on closer examination, it does not.

Gun rights are even more important to minority groups, and even within a particular minority the criminal element is a tiny sub minority.

Now to get speculative;
I think that the tools are available to clear the problems that the figures highlight. The Black community has excellent civil society bodies available, with churches, the Prince Hall, and volountary educational charities and societies as examples.

Pitched against those are left wing politicians and bodies looking for "clients", and who are willing to accept low standards of education, behaviour and achievement, and the continuing lure of money from sidestepping prohibition of drugs.

Stop seeing colour, the poblem is the criminals

Keith:
Stop seeing colour, the poblem is the criminals.

I'm not seeing color, I'm seeing culture. I don't think that there is any real evidence that one particular 'race' is more or less intelligent than another, or more or less moral.

I put the word 'race' in quotes, by the way, because I think it is an outdated concept.

However, I do see cultures that value human life far less than others. Inner-city black culture being one of them. Is it because of poverty, racism, the after effects of slavery, lack of economic or educational opportunities? Perhaps. But I note that black culture in the US ultimately derives its roots from the Caribbean and Africa, and those places aren't known for being especially safe.

That isn't to say that there isn't much to admire in afro-american culture, just that if they could get their violence problem down to the level of european-american culture, we wouldn't be debating gun control at all. It would be a non-issue.

Which brings up another point: Basically, at it's heart in America, gun control is about disarming blacks. When the various gun control organizations and leaders say "We don't want to take away your hunting rifle or shotgun", what they are saying is "Don't worry White America, we only want to take guns away from the 'Uppity You-Know-Whos'". Now that is racist, if you ask me.

I can aggree totally with that. especially the interpretation of the disarmament part.

Reading the local rag in Vryheid (a small town in zululand) back before christmas, one of the towns 4 or so weekly murders the cops thought was so the crooks could steal the guy's car radio...

A few of the local old timers, knowing that I was new to the place told me not to think of the local blacks as "europeans with black skins", they added that the local culture "does not value human life as highly as we do"

I was bloody careful!

I don't actually think that liberalism does anyone any good. A housemate who had managed a construction site in Lagos, Nigeria, had ended up paying the local "area boys" protection money after they continually shot his site up and his labour went on strike. He said that he used to do his shopping in the local open air market.

My response was "what!, were you not worried about security?"

He said there was never any bother, if anyone was caught causing trouble or stealing, the stall holders dragged them to an area of open ground, put a tyre round their neck and set fire to them.

I'm not suggesting klan like activities or anything discriminatory, but adequate policing (of all, and why not by officers drawn from the upstanding members of all comunities?)and support from the honest majority in the affected inner city areas could put the trouble makers "out of our misery".
Keith

"Stop seeing colour, the poblem is the criminals."

Most of whom happen to be black. Why is that? Please don't give me that old saw about poverty, single-parent homes, etc. When other races are saddled with these burdens they do not produce criminals at anywhere near the rate that they do in the black population.

Maybe the research of Dr. Rushton, et. al., is not the last word on the complex subject of race and crime, but it's a damn sight closer to the mark than liberals and neo-cons have come.

Educate yourself and don't necessarily accept the PC dribble that passes for thought on this subject. Rushton is not a Klansman in academic clothing trying to proffer some idiotic "white power" idea (not that anyone here is saying that). If he was that, why would he, a white man, put Aisans ahead of Caucasians on the intelligence continuum, other than the fact that quantifiable date verifies this? He is a scholar and researcher whose work should incite some real debate about the issue and at least question what has passed for conventional wisdom on this subject for decades. Instead, his research is dismissed out of hand, too often by well-intentioned folks who don't even realize how closed-minded they have become.
DAL357

In the British and US populations, the asian componant may well be ahead of the white majority in "measures" of intelligence, whatever those tests are infact quantifying. Certainly in Britain, Indian and Chinese / japanese origin kids and adults tend to outperform the white population, pakistani and bangaladeshi origin way underperform.

Those differences can equally be explained by the Indian and Chinese being largely businessmen proffessionals and academics, the white poulation being the full spectrum and the pakistani, bengali and afro carribean, having largely come as cheap labour.

Certainly the chinese labourers that I've seen on big civils projects overseas were as thick or as intelligent as labourers anywhere are (and were treated as expendable by their chinese bosses).

I know that I keep coming back to the Irish, and 20 years ago, jokes denigrating the Irish as stupid, were almost accepted as fact, the received wisdom, based on Irish migrant laboures was that they were thick!

I live in Ireland now, and can vouchsafe that the stereotype does not fit the whole population.

Huge exceptions that I have seen to the generalization of labourers being the less intelligent are some of the filipino and east europeans, who are educated to a higher standard than western europe and the US general populations.

Back to the question of black skin and disproportionate involvement in crime.

If we accept it as a paradigm, then we are pretty much saying that it is not changeable. I don't think that the evidence stands scruitiny, and I do not believe that we should accept criminal behaviour from any group (not even criminals)or for that matter accept lower academic performance, higher teenage pregnancy rates, single parentage etc.

was it twain or faulkner who said "if you treat folk like n's, don't be surprised if they start to act like n's"?

Keith:

I have seen many references to a book by Theodore Dalrymple which addresses this question. Reportedly, Life at the Bottom finds the same patterns among lower-class whites in the UK that are currently found among lower-class blacks in the US.

Other comments on this subject can be found in the writings of Thomas Sowell.

One quote should help:

The current self-destructive misdirection of energies in black ghettoes cannot be explained by a "legacy of slavery" or "racism." For one thing, this level of self-destruction in black communities did not exist half a century ago, when racism was worse and the black population was generations closer to the era of slavery.

source: http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell013007.php3

There's a great deal to be said about race, although "race" as defined culturally doesn't quite match up with "race" as defined genetically.

As was said above, though, the guns are not the issue.