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Hyperlocal aspect of gun violence
Four writers for the Guardian are asserting: "Want to fix gun violence in America? Go local." [theguardian.com]
In Monday's long discussion of U.S. gun culture there was a call for demographic breakdown of gun violence; this article provides that.
much of America’s gun homicide problem happens in a relatively small number of predictable places, often driven by predictable groups of high-risk people, and its burden is anything but random. . .
The Guardian’s new geographic analysis is the first time that gun homicides nationwide have been mapped down to the census tract level, researchers said. This new approach was made possible with the geocoded data collected since 2014 by the not-for-profit Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings and gun deaths using media reports. The FBI’s national crime data only provides gun murder statistics down to the city level, which masks the clustering of violence within neighborhoods.
Poverty, education, and race are shown to be the three best predictors of gun violence in a population based on the authors' analysis. Furthermore, within the highest crime neighborhoods they found that a tiny minority of individuals are responsible for most of the violence:
Looking at the risk of gun homicide in terms of sweeping racial demographics, or even in terms of individual neighborhood census tracts, still obscures the real concentration of violence, crime experts said – and that further concentration is crucial to understanding how to save lives.
Even within high-poverty areas that struggle with many kinds of disadvantage, the majority of residents have nothing to do with gun violence. . . In New Orleans, just 600 to 700 people, less than 1% of the city’s population, were involved in more than 50% of fatal incidents.
The article calls out both liberals and conservatives for distorting reality and attempting solutions that don't address the real problem:
For conservatives, it’s 'about things like cultures of violence, toxic family dynamics in minority communities, the failure of governmental approaches', Kennedy said. For liberals, it’s historic oppression, racism, lack of opportunity, and the broad availability of guns. . .
If single parent families, or poverty, or easy gun availability were the main drivers of gun violence, “that should result in vastly more violence that there is”.
Unfortunately, the closest thing the authors provide as a recommended solution is to treat the problem as a public health issue via epidemiology. I'm not sure how I'd react to the CDC taking point on gangland murder intervention.
If no other public policy shift comes out of research like this, I'd like to see fewer laws treating the non-violent 99% as presumed criminals for exercising their constitutional rights to bear arms and their Human rights to self-defense.
