Murder in the USA (Iraq, middle east, cocaine, drugs)
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Every day on here I read about - mostly from conservatives - the decay of our society. It's very often in threads about violence and murder, and very often embedded in threads about racial discord. If this forum were all you had to go on for your information, one might think we're living in the most chaotic, unsafe, violent, murderous times in our history.
I just wanted to offer a little reality check. We have pretty reliable statistics for murder going back to the late 1800s. Last year we saw the lowest homicide rate in the US since 1963, and so far this year the murder rate is down 18% over this time last year. Hell, despite what you may read on here, the year to date (as of May 5th) murder rate in Chicago is down 39% compared to last year.
Right now, 2013 is shaping up to be the least murderous year in the US since 1908 (yes, lower than the "good ole days" of the 1950s).
Every day on here I read about - mostly from conservatives - the decay of our society. It's very often in threads about violence and murder, and very often embedded in threads about racial discord. If this forum were all you had to go on for your information, one might think we're living in the most chaotic, unsafe, violent, murderous times in our history.
I just wanted to offer a little reality check. We have pretty reliable statistics for murder going back to the late 1800s. Last year we saw the lowest homicide rate in the US since 1963, and so far this year the murder rate is down 18% over this time last year. Hell, despite what you may read on here, the year to date (as of May 5th) murder rate in Chicago is down 39% compared to last year.
Right now, 2013 is shaping up to be the least murderous year in the US since 1908 (yes, lower than the "good ole days" of the 1950s).
What is really amazing is that all of this has happened with the highest gun sale rates in history. You can't have it both ways....
What you failed to add into the equation is the number of restrictions and regulations passed in the past 20 years and how those provisions have added to a lower crime/murder rate.
that's ok, some people have a hard time seeing the larger piciture.
People shot, or otherwise egregiously assaulted, often don't die today due to huge advances in emergency medicine. Given that fact, the homicide rate would have to fall quite a bit further to really be comparable with rates in the early 20th century.
Every day on here I read about - mostly from conservatives - the decay of our society. It's very often in threads about violence and murder, and very often embedded in threads about racial discord. If this forum were all you had to go on for your information, one might think we're living in the most chaotic, unsafe, violent, murderous times in our history.
I just wanted to offer a little reality check. We have pretty reliable statistics for murder going back to the late 1800s. Last year we saw the lowest homicide rate in the US since 1963, and so far this year the murder rate is down 18% over this time last year. Hell, despite what you may read on here, the year to date (as of May 5th) murder rate in Chicago is down 39% compared to last year.
Right now, 2013 is shaping up to be the least murderous year in the US since 1908 (yes, lower than the "good ole days" of the 1950s).
More people are shot in the USA today (not murdered) than they were in the 1950s or '60s.
I'm not conservative. I was born in 1971 and lived through the era of gang banger fights that transitioned into the era of drive-by-shooting when gangs put down baseball bats, picked up guns in the crack cocaine business they entered.
All these "greater safety" assertions are half truths with the purpose to deceive because traumatic injuries that would have killed Americans in the 1960s on battle fields or on the streets of America, record numbers of Americans are surviving due to advances in trauma care in both the war zones of Iraq/Afghanistan and on the streets of the USofA.
And people that continually use murder as a "test" for gun violence really don't know much about gun violence. When you see young men paralyzed and confined to wheelchairs due to bullet injuries, then you'll know what I mean. Being shot does not necessarily mean you'll become a homicide figure.
But here is a Milwaukee Journal (Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper) article and series of the greater significance and impact of gun violence in the United States.
Troy is one of thousands of shooting victims walking the streets of Milwaukee. Each year, on average, about 600 people are struck by gunfire in the city and survive, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis of data obtained from police, hospital and fire officials.
They live thanks to a small army of paramedics, doctors and nurses, who have turned a lifeline of care into an assembly line of treatment with clockwork speed and skill. They save about 90% of the gunshot victims they treat.
Kept out of view by the obscurity of night and banality of everyday crime, these front-line medical workers perform their craft on darkened streets and in sterile, windowless rooms at Froedtert Hospital and Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, where almost all life-threatening gunshot wounds are treated.
The quiet success of the trauma care machine may be masking the true extent of gun violence in urban areas such as Milwaukee.
Quote:
Researchers say paramedics, doctors and nurses have become so good at preventing shootings from becoming deaths that the homicide rate is no longer an accurate barometer of violence.
These urban medics save thousands of people who are shot every year in cities around the country, using techniques that were honed in war zones from Vietnam to the Middle East.
Now their own innovations are helping their military counterparts save the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Advances in emergency medical care over the last 40 years are responsible nationally for 30,000 to 50,000 fewer homicides annually, a study at the University of Massachusetts Amherst concluded in 2002.
People shot, or otherwise egregiously assaulted, often don't die today due to huge advances in emergency medicine. Given that fact, the homicide rate would have to fall quite a bit further to really be comparable with rates in the early 20th century.
Yeah, plus, I remember a retired cop that worked during the '60s and '70s in Milwaukee saying only about 7 people were murdered every year in Milwaukee during the '70s, and that was when Milwaukee had a larger population of about 700,000 people.
People were not getting shot like this when I was a child in the '70s and '80's either. And it's no longer just a gang problem anymore. It has become a culture of violence that a lot of people not in gangs have taken up. Ergo, the increase in mass shootings in white areas, and people shooting others in the inner city over petty stuff.
Example. Very dated article but still relevant in my mind.
It's as if Milwaukee, Wis., had reverted to a state of lethal chaos. A Special Olympian is killed for his wallet as he waits for a bus. An 11-year-old girl is gang-raped by as many as 19 men. A woman is strangled, her body found burning in a city-owned garbage cart. Twenty-eight people are shot, four fatally, over a holiday weekend.
MILWAUKEE — One woman here killed a friend after they argued over a brown silk dress. A man killed a neighbor whose 10-year-old son had mistakenly used his dish soap. Two men argued over a cellphone, and pulling out their guns, the police say, killed a 13-year-old girl in the crossfire.
Quote:
And while such crime in the 1990's was characterized by battles over gangs and drug turf, the police say the current rise in homicides has been set off by something more bewildering: petty disputes that hardly seem the stuff of fistfights, much less gunfire or stabbings.
Suspects tell the police they killed someone who "disrespected" them or a family member, or someone who was "mean mugging" them, which the police loosely translate as giving a dirty look. And more weapons are on the streets, giving people a way to act on their anger.
Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty of Milwaukee calls it "the rage thing."
"We're seeing a very angry population, and they don't go to fists anymore, they go right to guns," she said. "A police department can have an effect on drugs or gangs. But two people arguing in a home, how does the police department go in and stop that?"
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