“Not directly linked to criminal activity” doesn’t mean “unrelated to criminal activity”. It is uncommon, if not unheard of, for non-gang members to shoot people for using the wrong basketball court.
Not only does TNC talk about how difficult, desperate conditions can lead to an honor culture that’s really violent, Steven Pinker talks about it (either in The Blank Slate or Better Angels). C’mon, man, you LOVE Pinker!
When you lack a strong police force, Pinker argues, a police force that effectively monopolizes violence, people end up having to protect themselves from violence; and a very effective way to do so is to overreact to slights, so that people don’t look on you as easy pickings. He argues that the same dynamic you saw in 19th century backwoods Appalachia, or 18th century Scottish Highlands, shows up in 21st century urban America.
Did you read the article and all of the detailed, reported accounts they used to flesh out the data? I can’t quote everything here, but they are illuminating.
As Pinker noted recently for a special Harvard project, an important underreported fact is that black people are no more likely to be killed by police without reasonable justification than white people are. You will often hear this from the right. But what the right fails to grapple with is that too many police are fucked up about how easily they shoot people regardless of race.
Maybe I’m just having a senior moment, but who is TNC?
Thread drift, not following.
Ta-Nehisi Coates.
“Not directly related to criminal activity” is not the same as “not connected with any kind of underlying crime” because of that weasel-word “directly”.
Please, tell me how a turf dispute is *not *related to criminal activity. Do you believe gangs control turf just for shits and giggles?
So if you were NYT editor, you would have sent the story back for a rewrite?
If the OP is so concerned I hear there is an online publication which focuses a lot on BLACK CRIME. Perhaps they can help answer this riddle.
You are misrepresenting the story, and then, when people point it out, acting like the reporter got it wrong.
I wouldn’t send the story back for a rewrite, but would send your OP back for a rewrite. Try again.
My problem isn’t with the story. It’s with your gloss of it.
There are mitigating factors with these two cases. Most of them are media-related, but I shall elaborate.
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Heidnik’s ‘story’ was more morbidly interesting. His delusion was that he was going to foster a master race by imprisoning women in his basement and impregnating them. By comparison Graham just killed woman in a drug craze. The only thing of morbid interest with Graham’s story was his attempt to explain that the bodies in his apartment were there when he moved in (oddly, Heidnik tried the same claim).
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Heidnik was caught when one of his would-be victims used a clever ruse to escape and contact the police, who found the victim’s story credible enough to go and arrest Heidnik. By comparison, Graham turned himself in after they discovered the bodies in his apartment.
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Heidnik had a longer history leading up to his killings. Including his attempt to imprison and rape his girlfriend’s sister. Graham’s most evidently morbid thing was digging graves ‘for dogs’. But otherwise had no red flags that would indicate his murderous activities.
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Heidnik was caught first, and by the time Graham was caught the city, and more importantly, the world was a bit ‘serial-killered’ out. So not much attention was paid.
If the people living in gang neighborhoods I heard on NPR a year or so ago are to be believed, then not always. Since the decline in influence of the large organized gangs in the 90s, they’ve been replaced to a large extent by local gangs who do not always peddle drugs. They do, however, always defend their territory with guns.
If accurate, then I would expect it’s about burglary, carjacking, and theft rings, or protection, or gambling, or prostitution, or organized fraud, or some other criminal enterprise. If it has nothing to do with making money, then that’s a phenomenon I’m unfamiliar with.
That flies in the face of the NYT reporting. They describe it as being mostly about petty macho bullshit. Toxic masculinity, basically, of the type many of us denounced in that Pit thread recently, except backed by guns and a flagrant and alarming disregard for collateral damage.
That article does not go in depth into the motives and circumstances of gang and street crime related mass shootings. I think you’re mischaracterizing the article. AFAICT it doesn’t conflict with anything I’ve said.
I will let curious readers decide for themselves, but your take strikes me as reading against the grain, perhaps inserting your own motivated reasoning.
The article isn’t about the motives and circumstances of gang shootings – it doesn’t go into investigative detail into that topic. It barely addresses it, and only on a surface level. And that’s not a criticism – it’s not the topic of the article.
I think the question in the OP has been answered. “Mass shootings” (i.e. mass rage and ideological shootings directed at mostly strangers) are treated separately because they are a separate phenomena with separate motivations and circumstances. They’re no more tragic than other sorts of shootings, but they are harder to explain and understand on an intuitive level, therefore they are commonly thought of as scarier. Scarier and harder-to-explain things get more media coverage than things that are less scary and easier to explain and understand.
I read your article and it seems to support what everyone else is saying.
If you look at the motivations for black mass shooters, they would tend to take place in communities with a large amount of crime and tend to be either gang related or minor arguments between people or groups of people who knew each other that spun out of control.
When you look at motivations for white mass shooters, the would tend to take place in random communities, be either racial or politically motivated or have no discernable motivation at all, tend to involve complete strangers and are often meticulously planned by loners.
So what it sound to me is that the author of the NYT article is trying to make a commentary on how there is this large amount of black on black crime that goes largely ignored because it is overshadowed by the more rare white mass shooter incidents.
Given your posting history, I suspect that you are just trying to twist the article into a claim that the overly PC fake media is misrepresenting the white man as a violent psychopath.