The Propaganda machines which are the Main Stream Media in England feed us a steady trickle of stories from America involving shooting. The message is that guns are nasty, dangerous things that only governments should have; that politicians will protect us from evil. Articulating the Party Line is enough to show its falsity, unless one is determined not to see.

Then, by some odd chance the Guardian told us some of the truth in #Fixing Gun Violence In America. It is necessary to read its article closely because reality is not what they want its readers to see. Their headline, #Want to fix gun violence in America? Go local shows that. They tell us that the victims are largely black but skate over the fact that the perpetrators are too.

As the Guardian shows, there are small areas where the murder rate is much higher. They looked at the statistics down to local level; it reveals a pattern. There are 35 killed every day by shooting.

But  #Four and a half million Americans live in small areas which collectively add up to an area 42 miles by 42. They have 1.5% of the population and 26% of America’s total gun homicides.

This where the Guardian goes wrong; identifying the problem areas is a start. What does it say about the inmates who are the cause as well as victims? It uses the excuses rather than saying outright that it is a black problem. The point to take, which the Guardian enthusiastically does not is that the perpetrators are black too.

The worst of these places is #St Louis where 44% of the reporting areas are hot spots with multiple gun homicides in one year. Why are these places almost(?) totally black? The Guardian blames #white flight among other causes. Do Guardian reporters live in places like these? Certainly not. They value their own lives too much. Quite apart from that they want decent schools for their children, theatres, culture etc. They aren't there because White Men aren't there QED.

In fact the issue isn't as black as the Guardian has painted it. In Chicago for example three out of four murder victims are black; perpetrators ditto. one out of five are browns, i.e. Hispanics. The remaining five percent or so are white or even yellow.

Other places are different. As the Guardian tells us e.g. #92% of Baltimore’s gun murder victims in 2015 were black men. It doesn't say that 92% of the killers were too.

So, visit America? Yes but think about which parts you go to. Blacks, poverty & narcotics are a dangerous mixture. You might find more enlightenment at Grasping For Change on America’s Most Violent Streets – We Must Stop The Killing - https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/jan/10/st-louis-gun-crime-missouri-natural-bridge-avenue

 

Fixing Gun Violence In America
The map of America’s gun violence epidemic can seem overwhelming. There were more than 13,000 gun homicides in the US in 2015, across nearly 3,500 cities and towns. But the toll of this gun violence was not distributed equally.

Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns, according to a new geographic analysis by the Guardian, even though they contain less than a quarter of the nation’s population.

In 2015, there were more than 13,000 gun homicides throughout the US.......
… but half of those deaths were in just 127 cities, which contain almost a quarter of the population. Even within those cities, violence is further concentrated in the tiny neighborhood areas that saw two or more gun homicide incidents in a single year.

Four and a half million Americans live in areas of these cities with the highest numbers of gun homicide, which are marked by intense poverty, low levels of education, and racial segregation. Geographically, these neighborhood areas are small: a total of about 1,200 neighborhood census tracts, which, laid side by side, would fit into an area just 42 miles wide by 42 miles long.

The problem they face is devastating. Though these neighborhood areas contain just 1.5% of the country’s population, they saw 26% of America’s total gun homicides.

Gun control advocates say it is unacceptable that Americans overall are "25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries". People who live in these neighborhood areas face an average gun homicide rate about 400 times higher than the rate across those high-income countries.

Understanding this dramatic clustering of America’s of gun violence is crucial for the effort to save more lives.

“We can’t do much about crime prevention of homicide if we try to attack it as a broad, global problem, throwing money at it in a sort of broad, global way,” said David Weisburd, a leading researcher on the geographic distribution of crime at George Mason University.

America’s gun policy debate is usually driven by high-profile mass shootings that seem to strike at random, and it focuses on sweeping federal gun control or mental health policies. But much of America’s gun homicide problem happens in a relatively small number of predictable places, often driven by predictable groups of high-risk people, and its burden is anything but random.

The concentration of gun homicides in certain census tracts mirrors what criminologists have discovered when they look at crime patterns within individual cities: roughly 1.5% of street segments in cities see about 25% of crime incidents, a trend dubbed “the law of crime concentration”.

The Guardian’s new geographic analysis is the first time that gun homicides nationwide have been mapped down to the census tract level, researchers said. This new approach was made possible with the geocoded data collected since 2014 by the not-for-profit Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings and gun deaths using media reports. The FBI’s national crime data only provides gun murder statistics down to the city level, which masks the clustering of violence within neighborhoods................. Case study: St Louis

Let's take a look at St Louis, which has the highest gun murder rate of any large city in the country.......... Homicides are concentrated in areas of high poverty. And the lowest educational attainment. And the neighborhoods forged out of decades of racial segregation.

The clear dividing line you see between areas with many gun homicides and few gun homicides is Delmar Boulevard, which has developed over time into a rigid racial boundary that carves the city in two...........

Read more dispatches from St Louis, north of Delmar Boulevard »

For the greater part of the 20th century, racial housing covenants, discriminatory lending practices and “white flight” imposed de facto segregation as pronounced as any ever achieved by Jim Crow on St Louis’ black residents. Even today, some residents treat Delmar Boulevard as a line they do not want to cross. In May, a group of parents canceled a kindergarten Little League game held in a park north of Delmar Boulevard, telling the opposing team that they were “uncomfortable with the location” of their home field, a decision a home team parent called “racist”................

In New York, a city of eight million people, only 1.5% of census tracts saw two or more gun homicide incidents in 2015. That’s a much lower percentage than St Louis, where a shocking 44% of census tracts saw multiple gun homicides in 2015.

Compared with St Louis, New York also has much broader swathes of the city that saw no gun homicides at all.

New York City’s murder rate of about four murders per 100,000 people is neatly in line with the national average...........

New Orleans, Louisiana

..........................22% of New Orleans census tracts saw multiple gun homicides, and these areas were responsible for more than 75% of the murders. The concentration of violence in New Orleans is closest to the concentration in Baltimore.

 

Memphis Murders More Than Chicago  [ 11 July 2019 ]
QUOTE
An orgy of nonwhite violence since the beginning of this year has seen Memphis, Tennessee, beat even Chicago in the homicide rankings, with a 64 percent higher murder rate in the southern city.

Both cities are 70 percent nonwhite, but because Chicago has a much larger population, the murder rate per 100,000 people in Memphis is substantially higher.

According to a report in the local Commercial Appeal newspaper, Memphis has experienced a violent first three months with 60 people killed in 2016 at the end of March, compared to 35 homicides this time last year.

Those numbers mean that the homicide rate was 9.13 victims per 100,000 population.

In the same time period, 151 people had been killed in Chicago, but with a population of 2,722,389, the homicide rate is “only” at 5.55 per 100,000.

If the murder rate in Memphis continues at this pace, the city is on track to reach 240 homicides in 2016, shattering the previous record of 213 homicides in one year which was set in 1993. Last year, the city recorded 161 homicides.
UNQUOTE
Death comes to us all; for some it is faster. The homicide rate in Honduras [ Look in Murder ] is an impressive 108 per 100,000, a world record, making America sound nicer.