For all we hear about gun violence, not enough of us on the Right will correct people like Zandra Rice-Hawkins by calling it for what it is: gun CRIME. We also don’t push back that 2/3rds of the deaths from guns are suicides – they are SUICIDES and not violence.
When you account for that, this table taken from GunPolicy shows where the real problems are as the US ends up at the second least at 5.49 gun homicides per 100K guns owned:
And now a stat that shove’s a cigar into the Civilian Gun Disarmament crowd:
New study: About 500 people responsible for 70% of D.C.’s violence
Now a new study from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform is shedding new light on just how few offenders we’re actually talking about. According to researchers, almost 75% of shootings in Washington, D.C. over the past few years can be traced back to just a few hundred offenders.
The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform looked at the numbers for homicides and nonfatal shooting in D.C. in 2019 and 2020, and found that “most gun violence is tightly concentrated on a small number of very high-risk young Black male adults that share a common set of risk factors.”
Those factors include involvements in street crews, a previous criminal justice history and connection to a recent shooting. Often, they’ve been the victims of crime themselves. While the motive for the shooting “may not be a traditional gang war,” the report says, “often shootings are precipitated by a petty conflict over a young woman, a simple argument, or the now-ubiquitous social media slight.”
The homicide rate in D.C. rose by 18% in 2020 compared to 2019, the study found, and about 500 identifiable people are behind 70% of the 863 incidents involving gun violence. The studies also showed that about 200 people are driving a majority of these incidents at any one point in time.
Further, the study’s data suggests that your typical gun control laws, from universal background checks to bans on “high capacity” magazines, don’t do anything to stop this core group of hardcore offenders. Not only do they obviously fail to prevent these guys from getting ahold of a gun in the first place, but even when they’re caught and prosecuted, the consequences don’t seem to be changing too many minds. More than 80% of homicide victims and offenders had previous involvement in the criminal justice system, with many of them legally ineligible to own a firearm due to previous convictions. In fact, according to the NICJR report, just 24% of homicide suspects had no previous engagement with the criminal justice system, while 46% of suspects had at least one prior period of incarceration behind them.
I say “at least one,” because according to the report, most homicide suspects have racked up extensive criminal histories.
Of those who were known to the criminal justice system prior to the homicide, most victims and suspects had been arrested for property (avg. 2.8), drug (avg. 2.4), and unarmed violent (avg. 2.3) offenses (Figure 3). Overall, most victims and suspects with prior criminal offenses had been arrested about 11 times for about 13 different offenses by the time of the homicide. This count only refers to adult arrests and juvenile arrests were not included.
(H/T: Powerline)
