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Conservatives love to quote the statistic that many blue counties have a higher total number of gun deaths than red counties. What they hope you don't notice is that those blue counties are also the most populous. If you normalize the statistics per capita, those blue counties become far and away the safest areas of the country. The deep south has the highest rate of gun violence per capita.
Edit: Capita, not capital (my keyboard keeps changing it)
You know what cities also have more of compared to rural areas? Tanning salons, gyros, kitchen sinks, street lights, baby shoes, babies, pillow shams, spatulas, auto body shops, pork chops, thai restaurants, cork screws, massage parlors, sewer lines, electrical transformers, chiropractors, wrist watches, boner pills, cat toys, and meteorologists.
Total # of anything is meaningless propaganda. Per capita is the only genuine statistic in this matter.
Exactly. There's even an xkcd about it.
Bahahaha this fits perfectly with the “5G causes covid” conspiracy, thank you for posting this.
Not really, it's difficult to utilize. A town of 50k people who had a familicide that had 4 deaths makes their murder rate 8 in 100k... while a city with 1mil can have 80 murders and have the same per capita. It doesn't make the city safer magically...there is still other crime that happens.
Trying to compare rural areas and cities on gun violence is stupid anyways. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that gang and drug violence makes up the majority of our gun homicides and because more people are in cities and that's where most gangs are.... they're going to have more violence and death...
Let me see if I understand the argument here: gang and drug violence is magically somehow worse, and the victims somehow more deader than the family members? I dunno, sounds pretty sus. Like “gang and drug” is maybe code for something.
An argument about stochasticity would be more sensible, but if the town of 50 thousand has an average murder rate of about 4 per year over a period of many years, then it has exactly the same per capita rate of violence and death as the city, feelings about the perps notwithstanding. The city might even feel safer to the people living there, because drug and gang violence tends to be highly localized and predictable, unlike a guy walking into a bowling alley in a small town on a random night and blowing people away.
LiberalGunNut™ here! I see a great deal on both sides of the gun issue, I'm more than a little familiar.
"Gang violence" is often a straight-up dog whistle that says, "Black and Hispanic kids blowing each other away doesn't really count."
While I don't think we should be talking like this, it's not always the dig whistle. Some well-meaning people say it to emphasize the idea that gun violence is not nearly so random as the media implies. Cute little white girl catches a stray round? National news. 5 black kids smoke each other in South Chicago? Might not make the local news.
Point being, the second scenario is not random. Those people choose that life. (I'd also argue it was thrust on them by poverty and poor education, but that's a whole other rant.)
Still, I don't want to be painted with the racist brush, so I stay far away from that rhetoric.
And BTW, calling out ~47% of gun deaths as suicides serves much the same purpose, with the same touch of disingenuousness. No one's saying those are not tragic, but they're not random and can be avoided.
If you're not able to comprehend that a large city with the same murder rate as a small town based off per capita numbers isn't the same when it comes to violent crimes....I don't know what to tell you.
The city might even feel safer to the people living there, because drug and gang violence tends to be highly localized and predictable, unlike a guy walking into a bowling alley in a small town on a random night and blowing people away.
Do you even know what familicide is????
This just make any sense, so of course I don't understand. The same per capita violent crime rate between a big city and a small city by definition means the same risk of being the victim of a violent crime in both places, despite whether one feels scarier than the other.
But it doesn't, one is localized to a single family unit, the other effects random people.
The only difference, though, is feelings. If it's famicide, you can convince yourself it doesn't affect you because your family wouldn't kill you. Coincidentally, I just read an article about Kip Kinkel the other day. His parents also didn't think he'd kill them, yet it happened. From a big picture perspective, famicide is random. But for 4 murders in a city of 50,000 people, the odds are ever in your favor that it won't be you.
And, here's the thing: Even though a city of 5 million people has 200 murders in a year (same rate of 8 per 100,000), it also will not be you, or anybody you know. (That's with assuming that the murders were distributed randomly through the population, which they are most certainly not.) It's easier to feel endangered by 200 murders, because that's a number that the human brain can process, and 5 million is much, much too large for it. Based on the odds, though, there's as much chance that somebody in your family will kill you as a big-city stranger will. And, those odds are almost nil.
(My city has a rate half that, around 4 per 100,000, and in all the decades that I've lived here, it's never been anybody I know, and only once it was a friend of a friend. The victim of a famicide, actually.)
It makes you no more statistically likely to get murdered in one over the other. It may seem counterintuitive on a surface level because 80 is more than 4, but 1 million is also more than 50k.
No it doesn't, because in small towns usually it's domestic violence, in inner cities it's usually gang/drug violence that effects everyone.
And domestic violence only effects... checks notes oh yeah, everyone! Seriously, what kind of argument is that? Are you not aware of how widespread and common domestic violence is in both rural and urban areas and how much it contributes to gun violence and homicide rates?
Yea it's about 1-1.5k murders via firearms a year. But it's not something that randomly happens from people you don't know. Gang and drug violence does. I don't know why you seem to think less violence happens in the cities than rural areas. This is just stupid.
I don't think you understand how statistics work.
No I know how they work just fine, you don't understand the nuance of the discussion. You're trying to compare apples to oranges...
You seem to be under the bizarre impression that gang violence kills different, more special and more numerous people. Statistics show that it doesn't kill more people per capita, it's just that more people in smaller areas will result in more deaths from various types of violence including both gang and domestic, because that's how numbers and statistics and population distributions work. Both gang violence and domestic violence kill people, who are historically, the same as other people and not some unique species who are somehow killed harder or more tragically than another killed person. It's not comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to apples, except the farmer that grew one apple is wearing a different hat and lives in a different county.
You mean "per capita" (per head, i.e., per person).
Gun violence "per capital" (gun violence divided by number of capital cities) wouldn't do much except make these six countries look good in comparison since they get to divide by a number larger than one.
I do, it was a swipe typo
One may say... A swypo
I think in this case it turned out to be the dictionary, because when I corrected it it autocorrected back to "capital."
Swipe typos sure can be awful though. I've sent some texts to my wife where the erroneous would was so bad she thought something was wrong with me.