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(courtesy washingttonpost.com)

“Among whites, 77 percent of gun deaths are suicides,” washingtonpost.com reports. “But among black Americans, 82 percent of gun deaths are homicides.” Wonkblogger Christopher Ingraham warms up to his analysis of the stats by pimping gun control: “The traditional understanding is that there’s one overarching problem — gun violence — that can be addressed by a more or less uniform set of solutions: better background checks, improved technology, etc. This approach makes a lot of sense.” And then reaches the appropriate conclusion . . .

Gun rights advocates often correctly point out that gun violence springs from many different sources: Suicide among older white males in the heartland is a fundamentally different issue than homicide among young black men in urban areas. This observation suggests that bringing down gun deaths would require a multi-pronged public policy approach rather than a monolithic one-size-fits-all package.

To paraphrase the Chairman of the Board (and his daughter), and then Ingraham goes and blows it all by saying something stupid like I love you, pro gun control pols.

But the debate over gun violence has become so polarizing that many lawmakers — particularly at the federal level — have simply done nothing.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s a whole hell of a lot better than what “many lawmakers” want to do about “gun violence.” Checks and balances baby. Checks and balances.

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53 COMMENTS

  1. But among black Americans, 82 percent of gun deaths are homicides.” Wonkblogger Christopher Ingraham warms up to his analysis of the stats by pimping gun control: “

    What of that 82%, what percentage were killed by other black Americans?

    That part was, oddly enough, left out of the article.

    • Our suicide rate is far lower than it is in the gun free paradises of Japan and Korea. Our combined mrder and suicide rate (with all our guns) is lower than their suicide rate (without guns).

      By the way, they often commit suicide by jumping in front of trains. That is a very inconsiderate and gruesome way to kill oneself. I guess every way is an inconsiderate way, when you think about it.

      • Since when do liberals and the state condemn suicide? Isn’t this a “choice”? Don’t they applaud enlightened countries that have legalized suicide? I’m confused.

        Oh, because guns.

        • Only if it is rationed (wait we can’t call it that openly) medical care or abortion.
          If someone decides to kill them self that is different somehow.

        • Wow. So legalizing suicide is a “liberal thing”? Do you prefer it to be punished by death, as in the good old times?

      • A couple of years back, the fad in Japan was to use hydrogen sulphide (arrived at in high concentrations by mixing toilet bowl cleaner and a particular brand of bath salts) to poison themselves in a confined space.

        The decedents would be doing their neighbors and EMT’s a favor by using a gun instead. At high concentrations, H2S paralyzes the olfactory nerves, rendering high concentrations of the gas effectively odorless. EMT’s have been injured and family members killed by stepping into the environment where the decedent killed themselves without SCBA or MOPP type gear.

      • I have a friend from Japan who works for a railroad company. His entire job is to clean up after suicides. He works 70+ hours a week and makes the equivalent of $75,000 American a year for it. He tells me that his salary is paid by a fine that the government imposes on the nearest family of individuals that interrupt the daily commute by killing themselves. He says that our “suicide problem” is a joke compared to Japan.

  2. Where it says Legal Intervention, I wonder if that’s just police, or also armed citizens?
    In any case, interesting how few legal deaths there are in this graph.

  3. When is one of these amazingly intelligent liberals carry their endless “statistics” to the logical conclusion that blacks should be disarmed? How far down would the “gun violence” problem drop instantly? I have heard several work their way right up to it, then apparently recognize what they just said and back away. Including the prez! Just once, and I believe it would wake everybody up, suddenly a lot more people would see the entire approach is bogus!

    I mean, the gang-bangers responsible for most of the killing don’t own any guns legally already, another law would save zero lives. Murder (and suicide, for that matter) are already illegal, why pass another meaningless law which will not be enforced, it just goes on and on.

  4. Scary. 2/3 of gun death/ violence is suicide. So judging by that slide. Whites are killing themselves 2 to1 black on black violence.

  5. Crime statistics seem to point out very unambiguously that blacks commit crimes disproportionately to the rest of the population and they do it with other blacks as the victim the vast majority of the time. Asians commit crimes at disproportionately low rates and do it with asians as the victim disproportionately. Whites commit crimes proportionate to our population and do it with whites as the victim at exceptionally disproportionate rates. Hispanics/Mexicans/Latinos (however you want your label du jour) commit crimes at rates similar to blacks (substatntially more by some interpretations of the data) which is disproportionate to their population and they do it with every other race as their victim very much evenly. Hispanics are indiscriminate.

    When you strip out the guns from the talking points and speak to the criminality of the communities we see that guns are irrelevant. Whites mostly use guns to commit suicide. Blacks use them to kill other blacks and commit property crimes, asians use them to threaten other asians but only once in a while. Spanish speaking peoples use guns to kill everyone else and to commit property crimes against everyone else.

    If you were to not ignore the patently racist way that people do things you might make laws that are aware of it and act to correct some of the problems that prevent full assimilation. Something like whites being mandated to attend suicide prevention counseling after 50 years of age, blacks and mexicans being trained for a career at state run boarding schools where the trappings of their popular culture of criminality are not made available to them until their appetite for it decays away and vanishes like the cultures of the American Indian and they’re monitored weekly after graduation until they get a proper entry level job in a career. If they can’t do that by 1 year after graduation, they’re conscripted into the military for a 10 year term. Asians would all be given badges and instructed to assist in maintaining law and order. Hindu’s and Sikh’s would be given the task of maintaining the crushing bureaucracy that such measures would necessitate and enforcement would be handled by English soccer hooligans.

    Part of the above is deliberate sarcasm. Part of it is a rational attempt to expose the cold hard realities of living in a multi-ethnic free society and what kinds of measures we might take if we wanted to have an assimilated society built on laws and where the masses are brought to love those laws. Yeah, it’s Orwellian but Orwell was right about Stalin being right about how to make the masses love the state.

    • Crime statistics, same as any statistics, point out correlations, but do not necessarily indicate a causal relationship. Try cross-referencing the same data vs income, for example. And the similarity of perpetrators and victims with geographic segregation (i.e. how common it is for a given group to form monolithic communities).

    • If you really research the data, it tends to indicate that violent crime rates increase where there is a significant income disparity. Racial factors are involved, but tend to be a casual relationship rather than a causative one. Statistics can be manipulated to show what you want them to show if you are willing to dig far enough

  6. Is it callous to say that those suicides, regardless of race, were going to most likely happen anyway, by some means? To a suicide victim the gun is the means by which to end their lives. If not a gun then a bridge, a razor, etc. So then what? Perhaps if they didn’t have a gun there would be more “attempted” suicides than actual suicides, but increasing a suicide victim’s chances of failure (read: survival) is no impetus for gun control. It’s a sad day for humanity when anyone believes it best to take their own life, but gun control is far and away the “solution” to that problem.

    As for the overwhelming black homicides: Mr. Ingraham would do well to find some perspective on those, but only an advocate of gun rights would put him to task on that. Background checks do little for any gun obtained and/or used unlawfully. Not that it would deter the likes of Mr. Ingraham, who believes you just need more legislation. When that doesn’t work it’s because you just need some more, and then more…. His ilk is never one to fail when their legislation doesn’t work; it’s just that they didn’t go far enough yet.

    • That guns are the most effective way of commuting suicide is one of the gun controllers Big Lies. Hanging is the most effective method and the British preferred method. Unless someone happens to stumble upon you in 3 minutes or so you will be at a minimum brain dead 100% of the time. Guns only succeed 90% of the time.

  7. I haven’t seen the numbers broken down like this before, certainly food for thought.

    Black also has a higher percentage of unintentional deaths, which is interesting considering the lower ownership rate.

    Marginally higher rate of white legal intervention too, which I hadn’t expected.

  8. This graph with absolute numbers would be more instructive. Like how many total deaths is the white column percentage computed from vs the black column.

    -D

      • Without absolute numbers, for all we know black people have a higher total number of suicides and white people have a higher number of homicides. This graph is nearly useless as no relevant policy can be informed from percentages computed from different totals and placed on the same graph.

  9. Suicide like gun ownership is NOT illegal in the United States. Suicide is a personal choice which is not illegal, so what does it matter if a gun, pills or other means are used? The only thing that society should be concerned about is the muder rate no matter the means

  10. Why is anyone even wasting oxygen arguing about this anymore? We all know gun control works, just look at France, California, Baltimore, Chicago the list goes on. I mean hey, when was the last time we heard about a shooting in a gun free zone? Doesn’t happen! We should ban all guns so our country will be as peaceful as Mexico! Sure white boys will be falling from the sky or building bombs out of rice cookers, and the brothers will all be beating each other to death with bricks, but who cares when the reward is peace for our children.

  11. Blacks murder each other in record numbers and the majority of victims of abortions are black,do black lives really matter and if so,to whom.As far as suicides are concerned,it’s your life to take,some call it selfish,I say it depends on the circumstances,I would prefer quality of life as opposed to quantity of life.

  12. The real important lesson to be learned from these statistics is that black people are far more prone to criminality. But of course libtards would instead prefer to focus on banning guns rather than confronting ugly racial truths about black people.

    If D-Baggers really wanted to lower gun murder rates in America, then they’d support sending black people back to Africa.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/nypd-report-details-crime_n_1862771.html

    • If you don’t understand the meaning of the words “correlation” and “causation”, you shouldn’t be talking about statistics.

  13. Why can’t they see that banning guns won’t stop a damned thing? If guns never existed, they’d be trying to ban hammers, swords, and/or pointy sticks. Why don’t they just ban violence of any kind, that will surely work.

  14. Hello inth19h
    Yes suicide is liberal. It is liberals who advocate for suicide and liberalized suicide laws. It is liberals who want the state to do the killing. Those private doctors are receiving government money like medicare to do the killing.
    But if a conservative supports the state killing a convicted first degree murderer you are now against the state killing correct?

  15. >> Yes suicide is liberal. It is liberals who advocate for suicide and liberalized suicide laws. It is liberals who want the state to do the killing. Those private doctors are receiving government money like medicare to do the killing.

    I think you’re confusing suicide with euthanasia.

    “Liberalized suicide laws” happened several decades ago, when most civilized countries stopped treating attempted suicide as a heinous crime that was, in some cases, punished by death (oh, the irony).

    >> But if a conservative supports the state killing a convicted first degree murderer you are now against the state killing correct?

    Not quite. I have a consistent position here – euthanasia is perfectly fine so long as the person being euthanized is consenting to it. I’m against death penalty in general on the grounds that it’s too easy to make a mistake that cannot be corrected later (as statistics of wrongful convictions conclusively show), and it does not achieve anything that life imprisonment doesn’t do already. OTOH, I think that if someone sentenced to life (or any long term, really) wants to die instead, there’s nothing wrong with euthanizing them.

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