At RealClearPolicy John R. Lott presents us the latest instance of agenda-driven analyses, this time directed at proving that the number of homicides in the United States isn’t a serious problem:
According to a 2013 PEW Research Center survey, the household gun ownership rate in rural areas was 111 percent greater than in urban areas. Suburban households are 28.6 percent more likely to own guns than urban households. Despite lower gun ownership, urban areas experience much higher murder rates. One should not put much weight on this purely “cross-sectional†evidence at one point in time. But it is hard to overlook the fact that so much of the country has both very high gun ownership rates and few, if any, murders.
To put it simply, murder isn’t a nationwide problem; it’s a problem in a very small set of urban areas.
If I use precisely the same approach as Mr. Lott does, I could demonstrate to you that homicide isn’t a problem in Chicago, despite the city having a higher homicide rate per 100K population than at any time in its history.
The demonstration would go like this. Chicago has 77 neighborhoods. Two-thirds of the homicides here take place in just four neighborhoods (5%) and 89% in just six (7.8%). Not a problem, right? But, as I pointed out above, the homicide rate is the highest in city’s history.
The United States does have a homicide problem and it’s concentrated in cities of over a half million people with 20% or more black population. Even within that group of cities there are exceptions. Rather than saying “there’s no problem” find out what they’re doing differently.
There’s one thing that I suspect Mr. Lott and I would agree on: the difference isn’t guns.
It’s like abortion. As long as the killings disproportionately affect Negros, it’s not a problem. It’s actually a benefit.