8 ms·

2020 Saw Unprecedented Murder Spike in Major U.S. Cities

51 points by alexhutcheson 6y ago

cratermoon 6y ago
It also saw an unprecedented spike in gun ownership.
- sawjet 6y ago
  Are you implying that legal gun ownership leads to an increase in violent murders?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    The association between the availability of firearms and the homicide rate is very well established in scientific literature.
    - ctdonath 6y ago
      That association is scientifically inverse. More guns, less crime. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081QFZDM8 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081QFZDM8
      - T-hawk 6y ago
        But be careful about which way the causation goes. More guns don't cause less crime; more crime causes anti-gun measures.
      - cratermoon 6y ago
        John "Mary Rosh" Lott is an academic fraud.
        ctdonath 6y ago
        Many make that assertion, none back it up.
        cratermoon 6y ago
        https://archive.thinkprogress.org/debunking-john-lott-5456e83cf326/ https://archive.thinkprogress.org/debunking-john-lott-5456e8... https://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys-favorite-academic-a-lott-of-lies/ https://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys...
    - cratermoon 6y ago
      It's really the only variable differentiating the US homicide rate from other developed countries. The US homicide rate is 4 times the UK, 5 times more than Germany, 4 times that of France and thrice that of our neighbor to the north. While Mexico has a higher homicide rate, the gun crime rate in the US is 6 times higher. (All numbers are round approximations. Different sources and ways of calculating the data may result in variances but the relative rates don't change that much.)
      - dleslie 6y ago
        Perhaps worth considering is the rate of sexual assaults alongside the rate of violent crime. It's a culture problem. America has a violent culture. It's weird to me that we so often discuss firearm violence without also considering the prevalence of other forms of violence; these are symptoms of an underlaying concern.
        dx87 6y ago
        The politicians talking about firearm violence don't actually care about fixing it, they just say things that their base wants to hear. For example, the democrat congressman from my district in MD sent out an email talking about trying to fight the epidemic of gun violence by banning assault rifles and high capacity magazines, even though pistols are used in the vast majority of shootings. A few years ago the MD state democrats also blocked some laws that would have imposed harsher punishment on people who use handguns in crimes because they said it would disproportionately affect minorities. They didn't want to look like they weren't doing anything about gun violence though, so they banned bump stocks, even though they have never been used to commit a crime in MD, and the ATF says the functionality can easily be replicated with a rubber band or belt.
      - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
        Be very careful about comparative gun death statistics. Suicide by gun often gets wrapped into "gun violence" figures than make the US stats look worse than they actually are.
        6y ago
    - anewaccount2021 6y ago
      Since gun ownership and the number of guns have both been rising continuously for years, you can correlate them to anything you like. Since the number of guns was over three hundred million when the murder rate was lower, we can also correlate a large number of guns in circulation to lower murder rates. Or rising rates, or dropping rates. No matter where the trend moves, as long as there are over three hundred million guns in the US, guns are basically as available as milk and gasoline and effectively a constant. Or do you honestly believe going from three hundred million guns to three hundred and one million guns is worthy of measure for correlation? All of this is irrelevant in any case. 99.95% of guns are benign in the US. This isn't conjecture - its a clear ratio of total guns in circulation vs gun homicides. A law-abiding owner of a gun should be as concerned by a gun used in a murder as a chef would be concerned about someone being stabbed with a pearing knife. If you want a more realistic answer, I would suggest both economic desperation (unemployment, inequality, need) and pressures due to a new and unnatural mode of living enforced on the population (lockdown). Or if you want to get political, all of the cities in the infographic are blue cities that moved to lax policing policies in 2020.
    - busterarm 6y ago
      Sifting through all of the articles, we have about a 50% increase in homicides in US Cities in 2020, but only about a 15% increase in gun-related deaths, according to numbers from the anti-gun non-profit Gun Violence Archive... If the correlation were strong, you would expect to see them increase similarly... Keep in mind that GVA does not discount suicides from their report.
    - waiseristy 6y ago
      They usually also mention that it's hard to tell if more crime leads to more gun ownership vs more gun ownership leads to more crime
    - suifbwish 6y ago
      The same association with the availability of baseball bats and knives is also very well established. Something about having thumbs causes Murder.
    - jojobas 6y ago
      That's only one of the variables. In USA there are more non-gun murders per capita than total murders in Australia.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      US gun ownership has been rising substantially, yet the homicide rate dropped by more than a factor of two between the 1990s and 2010s. In fact, the mid 2010s saw the lowest homicide rate in over 50 years. By comparison, contrary to popular belief, several European countries allow people to buy firearms with similar availability as the US. The main examples that come to mind are Switzerland, Serbia, and the Czech Republic. The last one also permits concealed carry of firearms - something several US states prohibit. Widespread availability of firearms is likely a magnifying factor in areas with conditions that lead to crime, but plenty of areas with widespread gun ownership like much of rural America have low homicide rates.
      - vlovich123 6y ago
        Switzerland has 2 million private guns (excluding the guns for the militia) for a population of ~8.5 million. That’s about an arm rate of ~25% (not to mention that you need a permit for gun ownership & that’s tracked (with the Swiss voting in stricter gun tracking laws recently in 2019). By comparison, America has an estimated 353 million civilian guns, netting to just over each man, woman, & baby having a gun. Additionally, the laws are extremely lax meaning the government has poor records, enforcement, & a hodge-podge of laws across state lines around gun ownership. The type of superficial comparison that’s always trotted out in this kind of discussion is always so frustratingly predictable and superficial. Studies have repeatedly shown that in American society, increased gun availability directly tracks with homicides & mass casualty events. You can either regulate guns more akin to the nations you hold up as “exemplars” or make gun ownership less common. All attempts to regulate this situation in any way, shape, or form is regularly fought by Republicans, even for “common sense” legislation that has broad bipartisan appeal across party lines. Heck, often times people thing the government already does background checks for gun ownership without realizing the huge loopholes & intentional castrating of the background check process render the entire process a joke.
    - jussij 6y ago
      Here in Australia firearms have been highly restricted since 1996 and that move has certainly seen a reduction in the homicide rate: https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/Number-of-homicides https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/Number-of-homicides
      - marcusverus 6y ago
        The US has had an even more dramatic decline in homicide since '96, even as gun ownership has soared. https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-australias-gun-laws-reduced-gun-homicides/ https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-australias-gun-laws-r...
      - eindiran 6y ago
        There has been a reduction in homicide in virtually all places in the world during the same time, including many places where gun ownership increased during the time frame. So I'm not sure that we can conclude that Australia's restrictions to gun ownership are the only/principle reasons that homicides went down.
    - abarringer 6y ago
      Wyoming has one of the highest gun ownership rates 59% and one of the lowest murder rates 1 in 100k in the country. Maryland has 21% gun ownership rates, one of the lowest, and the fourth highest rate of homicides 9 per 100k.
    - zepto 6y ago
      It really isn’t. Pretty much nothing about firearms is ‘well established’ scientifically. Just like most other social science results. The relationship between poverty and shooting deaths is very strong though.
  - UI_at_80x24 6y ago
    There is one thing, and one thing only that causes shooting deaths. Bullets; and by extension guns. TFA doesn't go into detail (that I could find) about the cause of deaths that occurred in the mentioned 'violent deaths'.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- purephase 6y ago
  HN is a strong 2A supporting community, so this comment is not going to go over well.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    I'm a proud 2A supporter, but I think this has more roots in HN being a strong "fuck the poor" community and the tenebility of that position usually involves some amount of gun ownership.
  - dang 6y ago
    This sort of generalization is entirely in the eye of the beholder. HN is divided on divisive topics the same way that any large-enough population sample would be. Also, HN's community is only about 50% in the U.S. Your comment is already false about that half, but it would certainly be even more false about the international half, since people in other countries have totally different perspectives on guns.
    - purephase 6y ago
      I'm strongly against 2A, just want to be clear. It's just a topic that brings out all of the 2A folks in droves whenever it comes up here. I think the rest of the community generally shies away from the conversation for that reason. I should made that clearer in my comment. Apologies.
- jl2718 6y ago
  Interesting: “51% of first-time purchasers surveyed favored Biden, while 43% favored Trump.” https://reason.com/2021/01/07/record-gun-sales-and-diverse-ownership-mean-rocky-prospects-for-restrictions/ https://reason.com/2021/01/07/record-gun-sales-and-diverse-o...
jeffbee 6y ago
The headline conflates two things into an unsupported conclusion. The original author actually said that the murder rate nationally may have risen more than any other year. They did not say that the rate increase in any given city was unprecedented in those cities.
tesalrk 6y ago
<50,000 dead from corona under age 55. cdc stats. a whole country shut down results in political instability at every level. it will lead to war eventually. hundreds of millions will die. you will obey.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
I hate when these types of stories only report the percentage change of the incidents involved. Going from 1 murder to 2 murders is the same percentage change as 100 to 200, and in general they're dealing with so few events that it's hard to distinguish some meaningful change from expected variance. Also, it's not as easy to track but it'd be interesting to see if attempted murders saw the same spike. This increase could merely be a result of overtaxed hospitals saving fewer people.
- mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  Unfortunately, every one of the cities here had significantly more than just one one or two murders. At a glance at the linked source data, it looks like Seattle came in with the lowest values on this list, at 47 murders for 2020 vs 27 in 2019. One thing of note is that some of the values appear to be for not quite the entirety of 2020. The first sentence of the story's second paragraph includes a link to a Twitter post [1] from the person who compiled the data, which contains a second link [2] to the Google Doc that he created. 1 - https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905 https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905 2 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z9b5mIwztAwmEHJW7Q5DHMjS14-Rs7XIXOt33Al_rDw/edit#gid=1757262194 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z9b5mIwztAwmEHJW7Q5D...
  - mc32 6y ago
    I wonder, is it lack of deterrence (police presence and follow through) due to SARS-CoV2 or due to side-effects of SARS-CoV2 (perh psychological effects)?
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      The loss of millions of jobs is likely to have played a role here.
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      The explanation doesn't have to be so exotic. Millions of people in the US lost their jobs this year and the stress and financial difficulties from that increase the rate of all violent crime.
fat_pikachu 6y ago
Shootings are up 100% in NYC but murders were only up 40%. Any idea why the difference?
- UI_at_80x24 6y ago
  Covid masks interfere with aim.
- kgermino 6y ago
  Most shootings don’t end with the victim dying. Perhaps the marginal shooters were less likely to be familiar with their gun, or not shooting as intentionally. I’m thinking about people getting frustrated and using their guns in a fight, rather than planning to and intentionally trying to kill an “enemy”.
- mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  Maybe there were less stabbings, poisonings, murders without a weapon, etc?
  - rory 6y ago
    ~72% of murders are shootings [0], which makes the math on that pretty much impossible. Maybe the increase is all in wild shooting / firefights, while targeted and determined gun murders have stayed around the same level? [0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
- tomatotomato37 6y ago
  Small arms gunshots are surprisingly survivable if you can get to an ER in time. The victim will probably have permanent nerve and/or organ damage to the point of being crippled, but they're still alive. Also people miss a lot.
  - rory 6y ago
    That doesn't explain why people are surviving and/or missing _more_ (as a percent) in 2020 than in 2019.
vimy 6y ago
Turns out when you defund the police and disband special units murders go up. From the linked article: > New York's homicide count went up by nearly 40 percent with Mayor Bill de Blasio stating that the figures should worry all New Yorkers and it has to stop. Numbers started to rise after this: > The New York police commissioner announced on Monday that he was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units: plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nypd-plainclothes-cops.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nypd-plainclothe... The other cities mentioned had similar decisions that seem to have backfired spectacularly.
- busterarm 6y ago
  That's enough plain appeals to reason out of you, bootlicker. ;)
- eigen 6y ago
  alternately, de-emphasiing intervention and prevention and focasing on enforcement also doesnt work. Omaha didnt "defund the police and disband special units" yet saw 61% increase. [https://omaha.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/omaha-saw-a-61-spike-in-homicides-in-2020-after-the-lows-of-the-last/article_9937f2ee-49f8-11eb-89a3-27dd365ecaf9.html https://omaha.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/omaha-saw-a-61...]
- codys 6y ago
  Maybe I've missed this somewhere, but: - do you have a finer grained (month by month, for example) break down to support your assertion of the correlation in timing of the NYPD disbanding the "anti-crime" units and the homicide rate? - if so, is there something indicating there is causation rather than a coincidence?
- voxl 6y ago
  I'm glad you cherry picked an example to push a narrative.
  - vimy 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cltby 6y ago
It should be noted that nearly the entirety of the increase in murders happened after the BLM protests began in May [1]. Before that, 2020 was on track to be an unremarkably violent year. Given that this is exactly what happened in Ferguson and Baltimore after those cities’ riots, the increase was sadly predictable. Baltimore’s experience bodes especially poorly for the country; its homicide rate has stayed elevated ever since. The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters. [1] https://www.thetrace.org/2020/12/shootings-data-philadelphia-cleveland-chicago-gun-violence/ https://www.thetrace.org/2020/12/shootings-data-philadelphia...
- tolbish 6y ago
  Protests happen all the time. Why would you point to that instead of COVID, the loss of jobs, and the extreme wealth disparity that ensued?
  - the_drunkard 6y ago
    > Protests happen all the time. *country wide protests that result in the burning city blocks, murders, and looting do not happen all the time... I'm not sure why you're being intentionally disingenuous here.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters. How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
  - the_drunkard 6y ago
    > How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them? Here's a brief summary of violence that occurred in one day of BLM protests in the state of New York: 3 Buffalo cops run over 1 Bronx cop run over 2 NYPD officers assaulted https://www.syracuse.com/state/2020/06/suv-rams-police-in-buffalo-running-over-2-cops-more-officers-injured-in-ny-video.html https://www.syracuse.com/state/2020/06/suv-rams-police-in-bu... When looting and vandalism are allowed to reign supreme, the atmosphere alone sets the stage for more violence. Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.
golf1052 6y ago
Seems strange that the source data doesn't also include per capita numbers. Sure Seattle went from 27 to 47 but with a population of 700,000+ that's a much lower per capita number than say Cleveland going from 121 to 175 with a population of only 380,000+.
mint2 6y ago
Hey! Can everyone remember that 2020 was a crazy year with many different big things happening. Stop zeroing in on your favorite cause and blaming only it. At the very least acknowledge a few confounding factors if you really insist on making a case for your selected reason.
benwad 6y ago
I'll throw a theory out there - less recreational drug use due to lockdown (especially cocaine). What was a massive industry last year is now orders of magnitude smaller, with the same violent groups fighting over this much-reduced pie.

51 points by alexhutcheson 6y ago

cratermoon 6y ago

It also saw an unprecedented spike in gun ownership.

sawjet 6y ago
Are you implying that legal gun ownership leads to an increase in violent murders?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  The association between the availability of firearms and the homicide rate is very well established in scientific literature.
  - ctdonath 6y ago
    That association is scientifically inverse. More guns, less crime. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081QFZDM8 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081QFZDM8
    - T-hawk 6y ago
      But be careful about which way the causation goes. More guns don't cause less crime; more crime causes anti-gun measures.
    - cratermoon 6y ago
      John "Mary Rosh" Lott is an academic fraud.
      - ctdonath 6y ago
        Many make that assertion, none back it up.
        cratermoon 6y ago
        https://archive.thinkprogress.org/debunking-john-lott-5456e83cf326/ https://archive.thinkprogress.org/debunking-john-lott-5456e8... https://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys-favorite-academic-a-lott-of-lies/ https://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys...
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    It's really the only variable differentiating the US homicide rate from other developed countries. The US homicide rate is 4 times the UK, 5 times more than Germany, 4 times that of France and thrice that of our neighbor to the north. While Mexico has a higher homicide rate, the gun crime rate in the US is 6 times higher. (All numbers are round approximations. Different sources and ways of calculating the data may result in variances but the relative rates don't change that much.)
    - dleslie 6y ago
      Perhaps worth considering is the rate of sexual assaults alongside the rate of violent crime. It's a culture problem. America has a violent culture. It's weird to me that we so often discuss firearm violence without also considering the prevalence of other forms of violence; these are symptoms of an underlaying concern.
      - dx87 6y ago
        The politicians talking about firearm violence don't actually care about fixing it, they just say things that their base wants to hear. For example, the democrat congressman from my district in MD sent out an email talking about trying to fight the epidemic of gun violence by banning assault rifles and high capacity magazines, even though pistols are used in the vast majority of shootings. A few years ago the MD state democrats also blocked some laws that would have imposed harsher punishment on people who use handguns in crimes because they said it would disproportionately affect minorities. They didn't want to look like they weren't doing anything about gun violence though, so they banned bump stocks, even though they have never been used to commit a crime in MD, and the ATF says the functionality can easily be replicated with a rubber band or belt.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      Be very careful about comparative gun death statistics. Suicide by gun often gets wrapped into "gun violence" figures than make the US stats look worse than they actually are.
      - 6y ago
  - anewaccount2021 6y ago
    Since gun ownership and the number of guns have both been rising continuously for years, you can correlate them to anything you like. Since the number of guns was over three hundred million when the murder rate was lower, we can also correlate a large number of guns in circulation to lower murder rates. Or rising rates, or dropping rates. No matter where the trend moves, as long as there are over three hundred million guns in the US, guns are basically as available as milk and gasoline and effectively a constant. Or do you honestly believe going from three hundred million guns to three hundred and one million guns is worthy of measure for correlation? All of this is irrelevant in any case. 99.95% of guns are benign in the US. This isn't conjecture - its a clear ratio of total guns in circulation vs gun homicides. A law-abiding owner of a gun should be as concerned by a gun used in a murder as a chef would be concerned about someone being stabbed with a pearing knife. If you want a more realistic answer, I would suggest both economic desperation (unemployment, inequality, need) and pressures due to a new and unnatural mode of living enforced on the population (lockdown). Or if you want to get political, all of the cities in the infographic are blue cities that moved to lax policing policies in 2020.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Sifting through all of the articles, we have about a 50% increase in homicides in US Cities in 2020, but only about a 15% increase in gun-related deaths, according to numbers from the anti-gun non-profit Gun Violence Archive... If the correlation were strong, you would expect to see them increase similarly... Keep in mind that GVA does not discount suicides from their report.
  - waiseristy 6y ago
    They usually also mention that it's hard to tell if more crime leads to more gun ownership vs more gun ownership leads to more crime
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    The same association with the availability of baseball bats and knives is also very well established. Something about having thumbs causes Murder.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    That's only one of the variables. In USA there are more non-gun murders per capita than total murders in Australia.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    US gun ownership has been rising substantially, yet the homicide rate dropped by more than a factor of two between the 1990s and 2010s. In fact, the mid 2010s saw the lowest homicide rate in over 50 years. By comparison, contrary to popular belief, several European countries allow people to buy firearms with similar availability as the US. The main examples that come to mind are Switzerland, Serbia, and the Czech Republic. The last one also permits concealed carry of firearms - something several US states prohibit. Widespread availability of firearms is likely a magnifying factor in areas with conditions that lead to crime, but plenty of areas with widespread gun ownership like much of rural America have low homicide rates.
    - vlovich123 6y ago
      Switzerland has 2 million private guns (excluding the guns for the militia) for a population of ~8.5 million. That’s about an arm rate of ~25% (not to mention that you need a permit for gun ownership & that’s tracked (with the Swiss voting in stricter gun tracking laws recently in 2019). By comparison, America has an estimated 353 million civilian guns, netting to just over each man, woman, & baby having a gun. Additionally, the laws are extremely lax meaning the government has poor records, enforcement, & a hodge-podge of laws across state lines around gun ownership. The type of superficial comparison that’s always trotted out in this kind of discussion is always so frustratingly predictable and superficial. Studies have repeatedly shown that in American society, increased gun availability directly tracks with homicides & mass casualty events. You can either regulate guns more akin to the nations you hold up as “exemplars” or make gun ownership less common. All attempts to regulate this situation in any way, shape, or form is regularly fought by Republicans, even for “common sense” legislation that has broad bipartisan appeal across party lines. Heck, often times people thing the government already does background checks for gun ownership without realizing the huge loopholes & intentional castrating of the background check process render the entire process a joke.
  - jussij 6y ago
    Here in Australia firearms have been highly restricted since 1996 and that move has certainly seen a reduction in the homicide rate: https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/Number-of-homicides https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/Number-of-homicides
    - marcusverus 6y ago
      The US has had an even more dramatic decline in homicide since '96, even as gun ownership has soared. https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-australias-gun-laws-reduced-gun-homicides/ https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-australias-gun-laws-r...
    - eindiran 6y ago
      There has been a reduction in homicide in virtually all places in the world during the same time, including many places where gun ownership increased during the time frame. So I'm not sure that we can conclude that Australia's restrictions to gun ownership are the only/principle reasons that homicides went down.
  - abarringer 6y ago
    Wyoming has one of the highest gun ownership rates 59% and one of the lowest murder rates 1 in 100k in the country. Maryland has 21% gun ownership rates, one of the lowest, and the fourth highest rate of homicides 9 per 100k.
  - zepto 6y ago
    It really isn’t. Pretty much nothing about firearms is ‘well established’ scientifically. Just like most other social science results. The relationship between poverty and shooting deaths is very strong though.
- UI_at_80x24 6y ago
  There is one thing, and one thing only that causes shooting deaths. Bullets; and by extension guns. TFA doesn't go into detail (that I could find) about the cause of deaths that occurred in the mentioned 'violent deaths'.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
purephase 6y ago
HN is a strong 2A supporting community, so this comment is not going to go over well.
- busterarm 6y ago
  I'm a proud 2A supporter, but I think this has more roots in HN being a strong "fuck the poor" community and the tenebility of that position usually involves some amount of gun ownership.
- dang 6y ago
  This sort of generalization is entirely in the eye of the beholder. HN is divided on divisive topics the same way that any large-enough population sample would be. Also, HN's community is only about 50% in the U.S. Your comment is already false about that half, but it would certainly be even more false about the international half, since people in other countries have totally different perspectives on guns.
  - purephase 6y ago
    I'm strongly against 2A, just want to be clear. It's just a topic that brings out all of the 2A folks in droves whenever it comes up here. I think the rest of the community generally shies away from the conversation for that reason. I should made that clearer in my comment. Apologies.
jl2718 6y ago
Interesting: “51% of first-time purchasers surveyed favored Biden, while 43% favored Trump.” https://reason.com/2021/01/07/record-gun-sales-and-diverse-ownership-mean-rocky-prospects-for-restrictions/ https://reason.com/2021/01/07/record-gun-sales-and-diverse-o...

jeffbee 6y ago

The headline conflates two things into an unsupported conclusion. The original author actually said that the murder rate nationally may have risen more than any other year. They did not say that the rate increase in any given city was unprecedented in those cities.

tesalrk 6y ago

<50,000 dead from corona under age 55. cdc stats. a whole country shut down results in political instability at every level. it will lead to war eventually. hundreds of millions will die. you will obey.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

I hate when these types of stories only report the percentage change of the incidents involved. Going from 1 murder to 2 murders is the same percentage change as 100 to 200, and in general they're dealing with so few events that it's hard to distinguish some meaningful change from expected variance. Also, it's not as easy to track but it'd be interesting to see if attempted murders saw the same spike. This increase could merely be a result of overtaxed hospitals saving fewer people.

mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
Unfortunately, every one of the cities here had significantly more than just one one or two murders. At a glance at the linked source data, it looks like Seattle came in with the lowest values on this list, at 47 murders for 2020 vs 27 in 2019. One thing of note is that some of the values appear to be for not quite the entirety of 2020. The first sentence of the story's second paragraph includes a link to a Twitter post [1] from the person who compiled the data, which contains a second link [2] to the Google Doc that he created. 1 - https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905 https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905 2 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z9b5mIwztAwmEHJW7Q5DHMjS14-Rs7XIXOt33Al_rDw/edit#gid=1757262194 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z9b5mIwztAwmEHJW7Q5D...
- mc32 6y ago
  I wonder, is it lack of deterrence (police presence and follow through) due to SARS-CoV2 or due to side-effects of SARS-CoV2 (perh psychological effects)?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    The loss of millions of jobs is likely to have played a role here.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    The explanation doesn't have to be so exotic. Millions of people in the US lost their jobs this year and the stress and financial difficulties from that increase the rate of all violent crime.

fat_pikachu 6y ago

Shootings are up 100% in NYC but murders were only up 40%. Any idea why the difference?

UI_at_80x24 6y ago
Covid masks interfere with aim.
kgermino 6y ago
Most shootings don’t end with the victim dying. Perhaps the marginal shooters were less likely to be familiar with their gun, or not shooting as intentionally. I’m thinking about people getting frustrated and using their guns in a fight, rather than planning to and intentionally trying to kill an “enemy”.
mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
Maybe there were less stabbings, poisonings, murders without a weapon, etc?
- rory 6y ago
  ~72% of murders are shootings [0], which makes the math on that pretty much impossible. Maybe the increase is all in wild shooting / firefights, while targeted and determined gun murders have stayed around the same level? [0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
tomatotomato37 6y ago
Small arms gunshots are surprisingly survivable if you can get to an ER in time. The victim will probably have permanent nerve and/or organ damage to the point of being crippled, but they're still alive. Also people miss a lot.
- rory 6y ago
  That doesn't explain why people are surviving and/or missing _more_ (as a percent) in 2020 than in 2019.

vimy 6y ago

Turns out when you defund the police and disband special units murders go up. From the linked article: > New York's homicide count went up by nearly 40 percent with Mayor Bill de Blasio stating that the figures should worry all New Yorkers and it has to stop. Numbers started to rise after this: > The New York police commissioner announced on Monday that he was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units: plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nypd-plainclothes-cops.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nypd-plainclothe... The other cities mentioned had similar decisions that seem to have backfired spectacularly.

busterarm 6y ago
That's enough plain appeals to reason out of you, bootlicker. ;)
eigen 6y ago
alternately, de-emphasiing intervention and prevention and focasing on enforcement also doesnt work. Omaha didnt "defund the police and disband special units" yet saw 61% increase. [https://omaha.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/omaha-saw-a-61-spike-in-homicides-in-2020-after-the-lows-of-the-last/article_9937f2ee-49f8-11eb-89a3-27dd365ecaf9.html https://omaha.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/omaha-saw-a-61...]
codys 6y ago
Maybe I've missed this somewhere, but: - do you have a finer grained (month by month, for example) break down to support your assertion of the correlation in timing of the NYPD disbanding the "anti-crime" units and the homicide rate? - if so, is there something indicating there is causation rather than a coincidence?
voxl 6y ago
I'm glad you cherry picked an example to push a narrative.
- vimy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cltby 6y ago

It should be noted that nearly the entirety of the increase in murders happened after the BLM protests began in May [1]. Before that, 2020 was on track to be an unremarkably violent year. Given that this is exactly what happened in Ferguson and Baltimore after those cities’ riots, the increase was sadly predictable. Baltimore’s experience bodes especially poorly for the country; its homicide rate has stayed elevated ever since. The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters. [1] https://www.thetrace.org/2020/12/shootings-data-philadelphia-cleveland-chicago-gun-violence/ https://www.thetrace.org/2020/12/shootings-data-philadelphia...

tolbish 6y ago
Protests happen all the time. Why would you point to that instead of COVID, the loss of jobs, and the extreme wealth disparity that ensued?
- the_drunkard 6y ago
  > Protests happen all the time. *country wide protests that result in the burning city blocks, murders, and looting do not happen all the time... I'm not sure why you're being intentionally disingenuous here.
ardy42 6y ago
> The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters. How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
- the_drunkard 6y ago
  > How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them? Here's a brief summary of violence that occurred in one day of BLM protests in the state of New York: 3 Buffalo cops run over 1 Bronx cop run over 2 NYPD officers assaulted https://www.syracuse.com/state/2020/06/suv-rams-police-in-buffalo-running-over-2-cops-more-officers-injured-in-ny-video.html https://www.syracuse.com/state/2020/06/suv-rams-police-in-bu... When looting and vandalism are allowed to reign supreme, the atmosphere alone sets the stage for more violence. Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.

golf1052 6y ago

Seems strange that the source data doesn't also include per capita numbers. Sure Seattle went from 27 to 47 but with a population of 700,000+ that's a much lower per capita number than say Cleveland going from 121 to 175 with a population of only 380,000+.

mint2 6y ago

Hey! Can everyone remember that 2020 was a crazy year with many different big things happening. Stop zeroing in on your favorite cause and blaming only it. At the very least acknowledge a few confounding factors if you really insist on making a case for your selected reason.

benwad 6y ago

I'll throw a theory out there - less recreational drug use due to lockdown (especially cocaine). What was a massive industry last year is now orders of magnitude smaller, with the same violent groups fighting over this much-reduced pie.