This Wedks's awful Mass Murder

De Blasio’s reversal demonstrates the very awkward place political correctness puts politicians and media outlets in when it comes to the 75% of mass shootings in which (per the NY Times) the shooters are black. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. I started a GD thread about this a couple weeks back.

That’s an interesting statistic–care to link?

Now, using Mother Jones’s methodology, one gets an entirely different percentage–17%.

And in Emma Fridel’s paper “A Multivariate Comparison of Family, Felony, and Public Mass Murders in the United States” in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, she includes gang related murders and familicides that Mother Jones leaves out of their analysis and comes up with a figure of 37% of mass shootings have black shooters.

If you don’t have access to the pdf of the paper, screenshots of the table in question can be found on this blog post.

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=878741

People do not murder because they are black. Saying such is a horrible sick racism.

In which SlackerInc somehow decides that victims and shooters are the same thing.

That would be. Who said that?

In which Gary demonstrates that he apparently doesn’t understand the grammatical function of the word “and”.

In this example, Gary, the conjunction “and” is used by the writer to rebut his own claim.

…in which Slacker couldn’t defend his misunderstanding and mischaracterization of a NYT article in GD, and thus tries to take it to a Pit thread to throw out there. At least he can feel more free here to make proclamations about his belief in the inferiority of black people.

I watched/listened to a ton of news yesterday: NPR, CNN, PBS and MSNBC…and 99% of the coverage was about El Paso, domestic terrorism, white nationalism – virtually nothing about Dayton.

IMHO - the media has latched onto a narrative that’s relatively straightforward and lends itself to discussion. Dayton looks more like a Columbine scenario, and they don’t know what to say about random lunatics. I can’t blame them – I don’t know, either.

So what are you arguing?

I’m observing (not arguing really—it’s pretty undeniable) that “De Blasio’s reversal demonstrates the very awkward place political correctness puts politicians and media outlets in when it comes to the 75% of mass shootings in which (per the NY Times) the shooters are black.“ As the Cincinnati anti-violence activist (himself black) they quoted said, “White folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect”. But black folks like him then put pressure on politicians and the media to not ignore black victims of these alarmingly common mass shootings.

So my “argument”, I suppose, is for the media and politicians to throw aside political correctness and engage with the facts as they arise. That doesn’t require making some kind of hyperbolic proclamation that “people murder because they are black”. Since the vast majority of black people (black women especially) do not and would not ever murder anyone, that is an untenable proposition.

But we should stop conveying the impression that mass shootings are some sort of uniquely white sickness. (An impression I had erroneously believed to be true a month ago.) Although it does seem that the white shooters tend to have better aim! I doubt there is any inherent biological reason for this — maybe it’s just about better access to shooting ranges.

Just to be clear, in case you haven’t been reading my posts in other threads, I do believe Trump has blood on his hands for the El Paso shooting, and as I am strongly backing Beto O’Rourke for president, I’m glad he is saying so without mincing words.

I don’t think “conveying” this impression has ever been widespread. Shooting lots of people is not unique, or particularly common, for any particular race or other group, aside from young-ish men (if I understand the statistics properly). Purposefully shooting lots of strangers in a public place, due to rage at society or a hateful ideology, is mostly (but not uniquely) a phenomenon with young-ish white men, AFAIUI. And that’s the kind of shooting that gets the most attention, both because it’s relatively new in terms of occurring frequently, and less intuitive to understand than crime/turf/gang-based shootings.

None of this conflicts with the NYT article.

So, it’s:

  1. Hold a Rally. (Don’t pay for it of course)

  2. Make inflammatory ‘Fire in a Burning Theater’ statements about shooting people.

  3. Spread Youtube video clips of those statements repeatedly to the ‘faithful’.

  4. Wait until one Bubba is stupid enough and well armed enough to commit Mass Murder there.

  5. Smirk like a scummy rotten orange and wave from Air Farce One.

I finally steeled myself* and watched CFSG’s address. Honest to Og, I must admit that I was startled at how much he deceeded (is that a word?) my lowest expectations: no emotion, none of his characteristic tinyhand gestures, a delivery that suggested he’d just stoked up on 'ludes, body language that screamed “I don’t want to be doing this” — even his color was off. I’m 90% certain that Disney could have created a better audioanimatronic president in an hour or two.

And then there was the content. Nothing whatsoever about guns, and only one mention of white supremacy (and that in the context of how it must be renounced by “we as a nation,” not “I as a [putative] human being”). The rest was a mishmash of the internet, violent video games and mental health.

I wonder who convinced him, obviously against his will, that he had to get up in front of a TelePrompTer and read what it said. And whether they wish they hadn’t.

(Also see that he’s scheduled to be in El Paso Wednesday. Wonder what he’ll throw at the natives.)

*With coffee, not liquor. Unfortunately.

Andy, the fact remains that some black activists cry foul at the differing level of attention, putting PC pols like De Blasio (and PC voters like you) between a rock and a hard place.

Are you no longer disputing the characterization of shootings with four or more victims (dead or wounded) as “mass shootings” now that De Blasio endorses this definition? Nate Silver also used it on the most recent 538 podcast.

Disagreement from a black person (if there is any actual disagreement, which I’m far from certain of) doesn’t put me or anyone “between a rock and a hard place”. It’s okay to disagree. It’s not some tragedy or catastrophe or something. I think you have a highly distorted view of how liberals and progressives actually think and make decisions.

Boring semantics. The phenomenon discussed in the media most frequently is this mostly-new type of rage/ideology-based shootings, usually targeting strangers in public places.

I think that trying to make the divide by race is a red herring–what really needs addressed is that, basically, ALL mass shootings are done by men. Women just don’t do this. And it’s disingenuous to try to blame mental illness because that’s not it either–women have, statistically, less access to mental health care and of all women black women have the very least and yet they do NOT commit mass shootings. Men are the problem. Let’s start there.

Agreed. I wonder if the politically correct feminists and social scientists who decry “gender essentialism” would object in this case.