Official Department of Justice statistics show that black people committed 52.2% of murders for the year 2005 (the most recent statistics available at this time) despite being only 12.1% of the population. Whites (which under US law, includes Latinos), who represent 74.7% of Americans, committed 45.8% of murders.
If we assume a population of 300 million in America for 2005, that means that there were approximately 36.6 million blacks and 224.1 million whites that year.
The total murders by all races in 2005 was 17,029. 52.2% of those were committed by blacks, or 8,889 murders. 45.8% were committed by whites and Latinos, or 7,799 murders.
What this means is that the rate of murder (talking about offenders here, not victims) among all blacks in America is 8,889 in 36.6 million, or 24.7 murderers per 100,000 black people. The rate of murder among whites (including Latinos) is 7,799 per 224.1 million, which equates with 3.38 per 100,000.
The way that the FBI collects data makes it difficult to try to ascertain the differences in crime rates between "Anglo" whites and Latino "whites." In common usage, Latinos and whites are considered separate races. We can arrive at an estimate using the published California statistics for arrestees for murder.
In California, with an estimated 2005 population of 37 million, Latinos represented 35.9% of the population, or 13.3 million people. They were arrested for committing 48.4% of 2005's 1956 murders, which means that there were 946 arrests of Latinos for murder.
946 murders per 13.3 million people breaks down to a rate of 7.11 murder arrest per 100,000 Latinos.
Now for the white arrests. Whites in 2005 were 43.0% of the population of California, or 15,910,000 people. They represented 19.7% of the arrests for murder, or 386 arrests. That represents a rate of 2.42 per 100,000.
What this tells us is that any given Latino was 2.94 times more likely to be arrested for murder in California than was any given white.
Let's assume for a moment that the ratio between whites and Latinos is the same in terms of arrests for murder in California and convictions for murder nationwide, and apply that ratio to the above statistic for the murder rate of whites and Latinos combined. It may not be exactly correct, but for want of better statistics, it's the best estimate for the time being.
There were about 41.5 million Latinos in the US in 2005, and about 182,600,000 "Anglo" whites, and both groups combined committed 7799 murders. If the rate of Latinos murdering is 2.94 that of "Anglo" whites, that puts the white rate at 2.63 per 100,000, and the Latino rate at 7.73 per 100,000.
So there we have it. Latinos commit murder at a rate of nearly three times that of "Anglo" whites, and blacks commit murder at a whopping 9.4 times that of "Anglo" whites.
Now to the meat of the argument. Gun availability is the same for all of these racial groups. If gun availability has anything to do with propensity to commit murder, why is there a three times greater propensity for Latinos to kill than whites, and a nine times greater propensity for blacks to kill than whites?
Clearly, there is some other thing at work here. I don't pretend to know why this is, but it's not the availability of guns. It's certainly not going to slow the murders down by ignoring the vastly different rates of murder between different races and favoring things like gun bans that are proven to make things worse.
If you find these statistics hard to swallow... so did I when I first read them. If the much higher conviction rates for blacks and Latinos was a result of white racism against minorities, it would seem that the conviction rates for Asians (which includes individuals whose ancestry goes back to India as well as China, for example) would not be lower than that of whites, let alone blacks and Latinos, and it would also seem that the rate of conviction for Latinos would be much closer to that of blacks than it is.
There is some cultural or sociological effect here. I suspect that in the case of the blacks, it has to do with the lingering effects of our history of slavery. While blacks are more equal now than at any point in history, the subcultural legacy of having been brought to America as livestock remains. I don't think that asking people who never owned slaves for reparations to people that have never been slaves is the answer. I wish I knew what was.
It's clearly not the lack of gun control, though. It is going to be a lot harder than simply passing a law that says that no one can have guns. Clearly, murder is about people who choose to kill, not about the tool that they choose. People use guns to commit the majority of murders because they are efficient for that purpose... but that does not mean for a second that getting rid of guns (if that were possible, which it obviously is not) would solve the problem of more than ten thousand people a year (obviously, some of the murderers in 2005 were responsible for more than one of the 17,029 murders) deciding to kill.
That is the problem, and we need to be able to defend ourselves against people who don't value the lives of others. |
