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Comment by Bran_son | Hacker News Reader

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Why the filter on race? And why are you comparing a rate in a subset of US population to the rate for the entire population in other countries?

Edit: typo

If you can find per-capita homicide rates disaggregated by race in other countries, that would be most welcome.

Why does it need to be by race?

The media seemed extremely motivated to point out race for George Floyd and other anecdotal cases. It seems only fair to then also look at race when it comes to statistics. Otherwise, one is effectively lying by cherry-picking which cases to focus on.

Besides, others seem quite confident the issue is guns. Without examining other causes, we can't be sure that's the case.

I'm confident it's white men with a history of misogyny and access to guns. The data supports that too. We love screaming about the one offs but that's smoke and mirrors.

The FBI crime statistics I cited [0] show that whites have one of the lowest per-capita homicide rates. Specifically, the white+Hispanic [1] homicide rate is 1.16 per 100k, while the Black rate is 7.98. So which data are you referring to? Because the data I can find supports the exact opposite of your claim.

[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[1] Due to how the FBI reports Hispanic ethnicity separately from race, it is difficult to calculate homicide rates for whites and Hispanics separately, so for this comparison the white+Hispanic rate will have to suffice.

Sorry, I thought we were talking about mass shootings.

Mass shooters largely reflect the (male) population: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/03/24/mass-shooters-by-race-a...

That said, mass shootings are a small part of all homicide, so they give the wrong impression of overall violent crime and homicide, and I see no justification for ignoring non-mass homicide. But the media love to focus on them to the exclusion of all else.

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