Re: Black Americans arm themselves in response to pandemic, protests

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wings wrote: Mon Aug 03, 2020 5:07 pm
Interesting regressions there. I'm a fan of simple models, despite their obvious limitations. But the US has a Gini coefficient that's just off the charts. What would be interesting from a historic context would be to model how that relationship has changed since, say, the 1950s. We had plenty of guns around then, too - but that 90% top tax rate might've done more good than we realized. It's a great case for economic justice and reducing inequality as root cause mitigation goes.

Somewhere in the archives, there's a link to a county-level analysis by one of the Oregon papers. I remember diving into it before I joined. The regional differences between gun suicides and gun homicides were astonishing - very much a rural vs. urban problem. I can't help but suspect that economic issues play a major role in suicide - job losses etc. - even though there isn't the same radical disparity in wealth in the worst-afflicted counties.

On the disarmament front - it also suggests that taking away guns won't reduce violence in an increasingly unequal society. Look at the UK and their shift to knife violence. Which then makes me consider the parallels between switchblades and ARs.

Thanks for the links, guys!
I think most of us here intrinsically recognize that the inequity in wealth causes violence. What that article doesn't capture is WHY we have wealth inequity, and I'd argue that it's systemic and deliberate povertization (not a real word) so that we have someone to work at McDonalds to serve the fries, or wave to the line of people coming into Walmart, all working part-time without benefits, paycheck-to-paycheck. Desperate conditions lead to desperate actions, and finally, desperate outcomes.

You could fairly easily track the rates of violence to wealth inequity, which conversely, also probably track very closely with the rates of union membership.

The 90% tax bracket could be re-implemented, but unfortunately, not in the current political conditions... the wealthy have taken over the democratic process. Until that is corrected, the rest is all just hopes and dreams.

We had plenty of guns in the 50s and 60s, and plenty of racial tension. What we also had was the rich who paid their fair share because society by-and-large recognized that the wealthy were making their money from the efforts of other people. Today, we have communism in reverse, or crony capitalism, however you'd like to frame it. The hedge fund managers are directly responsible for the violence in the streets, however they will never take any accountability for it. To listen to them, their wealth is created in a vacuum. It's not (by their accounts) the result of years of generational poverty for millions of people in the richest country the earth has ever known.

Re: Black Americans arm themselves in response to pandemic, protests

27
Black Americans Now Account For The Highest Increase In Gun Sales Of Any Demographic
Overall, gun sales have been surging across the United States. According to The Brookings Institution, nearly 3 million firearms had been purchased since March when the public health crisis caused the shut down of major cities across the U.S. The research also shows that since March 13, when Trump first declared the viral outbreak a national emergency, firearm sales increased significantly over the next two weeks climbing as high as 176,000 orders on March 16 alone. In the month of March, there were an additional 700,000 firearms bought more than usual. The data showed that the number increased again with a 50% increase for June sales around the time the protests over police brutality began to take over the nation.
“The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women, who show a 58.2% increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year,” wrote Jim Curcuruto, National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) director of Research and Market Development, in his report according to AOL News. “Bottom line is that there has never been a sustained surge in firearm sales quite like what we are in the midst of.”

Groups like the Black Gun Owners Association have been said to experience a tremendous spike in interest and online traffic since the protests started. “Whether it was fear of a food shortage, lack of a grocery store, the short response times for law enforcement or whether people were just fearful they were going to be attacked, I don’t know,” said Derrick Morgan, national commander of the Black Gun Owners Association, to Politico.
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