Today's Mass Shooting

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Thermal said:
Been addressed on other threads. Appalachia, one of the USAs poorest areas, is home to 25 million predominately white and impoverished people with high gun ownership and very low violent crime.
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Appalachia consists almost entirely of extremely-sparsely-populated counties, and the crime rate is commensurate with the population density. Wherever the population is denser, the crime rate goes up. Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee, two cities squarely within Appalachia, despite not being major cities have been among the top 30 highest-violent-crime-rate cities in America.

Mass shootings have also taken place within Appalachia, including some particularly deadly or otherwise notable ones, such as the 2008 U-U Church shooting, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and the Amish schoolhouse massacre.
 
Checkmite said:
Appalachia consists almost entirely of extremely-sparsely-populated counties, and the crime rate is commensurate with the population density. Wherever the population is denser, the crime rate goes up. Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee, two cities squarely within Appalachia, despite not being major cities have been among the top 30 highest-violent-crime-rate cities in America.

Mass shootings have also taken place within Appalachia, including some particularly deadly or otherwise notable ones, such as the 2008 U-U Church shooting, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and the Amish schoolhouse massacre.
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Of course there are exceptions. No one claims that Appalachia is Shangri-La. But the data is the data. Density does not negate the alleged affects of poverty. If it did, the argument would not be that blacks were disproportionately violent due to poverty; it would be that blacks are disproportionately violent due to population density. Which, obviously, was not the claim I was refuting.
 
Thermal said:
Been addressed on other threads. Appalachia, one of the USAs poorest areas, is home to 25 million predominately white and impoverished people with high gun ownership and very low violent crime.

If you are suggesting inner city poverty among blacks to be "different" and more prone to extreme violence, you are tacitly acknowledging that police are right to profile. Its a no-win.

As politically toxic as it is to discuss, the Wiki article cited by Bogative and ahhell are the Big Kahunas of data points.

Black people commit 56% of homicides, and that's six times the rate of white people.

White people commit less homicides than their representation in the population.

Also, white cats, contrary to pop wisdom, commit less spree killings, proportionately.

These are FBI stats. We can debate the reasons for this disparity, such as socioeconomic and cultural factors, lack of opportunities and sufficient education grounded in generational racism and Jim Crow fallout and the like, but the data is the data and shouldn't get handwaved away on a ******* skeptics forum. Shouldn't this be a place to discuss these kinds of things dispassionately, and without the posturing?
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Where have you been the past four years or so?
 
Thermal said:
Density does not negate the alleged affects of poverty. If it did, the argument would not be that blacks were disproportionately violent due to poverty; it would be that blacks are disproportionately violent due to population density. Which, obviously, was not the claim I was refuting.
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The "claim" you're supposedly refuting is a vast oversimplification. Of course population density is a major contributing factor to the severity of the effects of poverty; how could it not be?
 
Checkmite said:
The "claim" you're supposedly refuting is a vast oversimplification.
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Which was my point in refuting it. Not merely a "vast oversimplification", but an outright distortion.

Of course population density is a major contributing factor to the severity of the effects of poverty; how could it not be?
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I didn't say it wasn't a contributor; it obviously is. I said it does not negate anything, as the claim implies.

If we keep whittling down our definition of poverty till we restrict to "only the kind urban black people live in", might that say a little something about our reasoning?
 
Thermal said:
I didn't say it wasn't a contributor; it obviously is. I said it does not negate anything, as the claim implies.
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No, the claim doesn't "imply" that.

Lower crime in low-density poverty areas compared to high-density ones isn't a function of the lower density "negating" the effects of poverty; it's a function of the higher density exacerbating them - along with the practical consideration being that it's hard to commit a crime against someone who isn't there.

Blacks experience poverty at more than double the rate of white people in America, at 18.8% versus 7.3% - the latter of which includes all white people living in poverty in Appalachia. It is misleading at the very least to invoke Appalachia - a large area with a sparse and diffused population - as a place where whites experience the effects of poverty at a level exceeding or even remotely comparable to the situation faced by the national African-American community, as you must be doing if you claim that it negates poverty as a sufficient explanation for higher numbers of black crime. Nor is it appropriate to take a comparatively small enclave of white people to use as a comparison to argue that a nationwide statistic reflects poorly on black people. Or for any other argument about a nationwide statistic.
 
Checkmite said:
No, the claim doesn't "imply" that.

Lower crime in low-density poverty areas compared to high-density ones isn't a function of the lower density "negating" the effects of poverty; it's a function of the higher density exacerbating them - along with the practical consideration being that it's hard to commit a crime against someone who isn't there.
Blacks experience poverty at more than double the rate of white people in America, at 18.8% versus 7.3% - the latter of which includes all white people living in poverty in Appalachia. It is misleading at the very least to invoke Appalachia - a large area with a sparse and diffused population - as a place where whites experience the effects of poverty at a level exceeding or even remotely comparable to the situation faced by the national African-American community, as you must be doing if you claim that it negates poverty as a sufficient explanation for higher numbers of black crime. Nor is it appropriate to take a comparatively small enclave of white people to use as a comparison to argue that a nationwide statistic reflects poorly on black people. Or for any other argument about a nationwide statistic.
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Yup, its difficult to carry out a respectable spree-shooting when you have to drive miles between victims. You need to go to a **gasp** more densely populated area;)
 
Checkmite said:
No, the claim doesn't "imply" that.

Lower crime in low-density poverty areas compared to high-density ones isn't a function of the lower density "negating" the effects of poverty; it's a function of the higher density exacerbating them - along with the practical consideration being that it's hard to commit a crime against someone who isn't there.

Blacks experience poverty at more than double the rate of white people in America, at 18.8% versus 7.3% - the latter of which includes all white people living in poverty in Appalachia.
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The obvious problem being that if black people committing six times the violent crime is due to being in poverty, but they are only a little over twice as likely to be living in poverty...let's see, carry the two...I think there's a problem in the math there somewhere?

Which is my general point: posters like to flip around Twitter stats. They don't hold up under light scrutiny. The issue is complex and multi faceted, and (g)you can't simply say things like "it's because more black people live in poverty". That is partially true. It does not remotely account for the grossly disparate rates of violent crime.

It is misleading at the very least to invoke Appalachia - a large area with a sparse and diffused population - as a place where whites experience the effects of poverty at a level exceeding or even remotely comparable to the situation faced by the national African-American community, as you must be doing if you claim that it negates poverty as a sufficient explanation for higher numbers of black crime. Nor is it appropriate to take a comparatively small enclave of white people to use as a comparison to argue that a nationwide statistic reflects poorly on black people. Or for any other argument about a nationwide statistic.
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Oh give me a freaking break. Small enclave? It's 25 million people, damn near a tenth of the US population.

The whole gig amounts to trying to boil down complex realities into confirmation biased quips, which is dishonest. White people are demonstrably not more often spree killers, despite multiple assertions here (which is how this derail got started, which I am more than happy to abandon). They are in fact less often to be so ( unless, again, we get dishonest and throttle down to Best Tactics and Marksmanship Awards.

Posted upthread, four of this year's mass killings were not by a white person. Two were. But we're still hearing "why is it always a white boy?" It really should get held to the fire every time it's said.
 
smartcooky said:
....because "more likely" isn't term I used...:rolleyes:
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More likely or less likely, still wrong.

What the good Mr Checkmite showed is that black people are abt twice as likely to be living in poverty as white people, but are six times more likely to commit violent crime. Therefore, not much of a correlation at all. You disagree?
 
smartcooky said:
Yup, its difficult to carry out a respectable spree-shooting when you have to drive miles between victims. You need to go to a **gasp** more densely populated area;)
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We were not talking about just spree killings. That data represented all violence.

But Checkmite posted some Appalachian spree kills upthread for you anyway.

Eta: and are you suggesting that it's inordinately difficult to find groups of a few dozen in rural areas? We're the massacred Amish girls crisis actors or something? Share your conspiracy theory, please. Sounds fascinating.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
What's curious about that? Health care costs a lot of money here in the US. Plenty of people in need of treatment, including mental health treatment, do without.

It's very common for mentally ill people in the US to not have access to mental health treatment outside of a carceral context.
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You have access to it through an emergency department and there is low and no cost mental health care if you are seriously whacked out.

Paranoid schizophrenia is pretty severe not to have had a referral of some sort. We don't know if he did or didn't have such a referral. There's been a report he was playing with the rifle last week.

Again, we don't know if it was reported to any authority.

And there's a note somewhere he was on an FBI watch list. If that's true they need to seriously look at why they weren't notified of the rifle purchase.
 
Thermal said:
Twasn't I who brought it up. The hackneyed white self-flaggelation of "why is it always white guys" was what I was initially responding to, and others widened the scope, as often happens in discussions.

What gets my goat is the refusal for skeptics to accept emperical data, and defer to Twitter rumors. Pisses me off, and I'll call it out at every opportunity that it arises. We, of all discussion fora, should be above that.
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What gets mine is someone linking to some end-result data where we cannot see just what it is they are counting.
 
Thermal said:
Oh give me a freaking break. Small enclave? It's 25 million people, damn near a tenth of the US population.
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Well, not quite. Only about 20 million of those 25 are white. But more importantly, those 20 million are being compared by you to the entire population of African Americans, which numbers over 40.6 million.
 
Thermal said:
More likely or less likely, still wrong.



What the good Mr Checkmite showed is that black people are abt twice as likely to be living in poverty as white people, but are six times more likely to commit violent crime. Therefore, not much of a correlation at all. You disagree?
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I mean if committing one crime lifted a person from poverty to prosperity I could see the confusion.

Was it expected that poverty and crime would have a static, formulaic relationship that could be expressed in simple ratios?

ETA: plus factors like being able to hire a good lawyer, plead to lesser crimes, etc. "Crimes committed by..." stats should often be properly stated as "conviction rates by..."
 
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Thermal said:
What the good Mr Checkmite showed is that black people are abt twice as likely to be living in poverty as white people, but are six times more likely to commit violent crime. Therefore, not much of a correlation at all. You disagree?
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He should. Where did you pull that "therefore" from? You honestly think that a correlative relationship ought to yield something like "1 crime per 1 poverty"?

ETA: What Delphic Oracle said.
 
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