White Males Should Really Not Buy Guns
The Audacious Epigone asks whether I should qualify my statement that if you buy a gun, the person you are most likely to shoot with it is yourself, taking race into account.
I took a look and it turns out that the breakdown of homicide and suicide rates by race and gender are quite interesting.
For white males, the suicide rate is 21.2 per 100,000 people and the homicide rate is just 3.5 per 100,000, so that suicides make up 86% of the combined death rate. For black males, on the other hand, the homicide rate is 37.3 while the suicide rate is 9.2, so suicides make up just 20% of the combined rate.
While these statistics are not just limited to gun deaths, I would guess that the gun rates are not much different. I amend my following statement as such:
If you are Hispanic or black, then you actually are more likely to shoot someone else than yourself with a gun. If you are Asian or Native American, you are more likely to shoot yourself than someone else. And if you are a white male, you really should stay away from guns, for you are 6 times more likely to kill yourself than you are to kill another person.
stats via National Center for Health Statistics (.pdf)
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2 comments:
Hehe, thanks for the follow up. Good stuff as always.
My snide comment was intended to insinuate that someone who wants to kill himself will probably find a way to do so without the aid of a gun (although around half of all male suicides are from firearms), but if he wants to kill you, substitutes don't tend to hold up as well. The point being that white guys with guns don't tend to pose much of a threat to society and thus opposition to white guys having guns because they might kill themselves is roughly tantamount to opposing allowing people do whatever they want in their own homes.
Pointing it out comes off as a racist, but it seems unfair to me that whites guys wanting to own guns in the US must consistently face opposition from people wielding facts about the gun havoc wrought primarily by blacks on others in society.
I live in a semi-rural area. I don't even lock my doors. Most of my neighbors have guns (I'm in Kansas) and consequently the idea that someone would break in to one of the houses in my neighborhood is almost laughable. I don't own any firearms but a burglar would be playing Russian roullete by assuming as much.
Hehe, thanks for the follow up. Good stuff as always.
Well, thanks for raising the topic. It was really interesting data, so I am glad you spurred me to look at it.
My snide comment was intended to insinuate that someone who wants to kill himself will probably find a way to do so without the aid of a gun (although around half of all male suicides are from firearms), but if he wants to kill you, substitutes don't tend to hold up as well.
Good point. My original snide comment was just to point out the surprising (well at least to me) fact that guns are more likely used to kill yourself than someone else. That those liberals that are for stricter gun laws might change their mind when they see that those who are actually dying are the ones buying the guns.
Pointing it out comes off as a racist, but it seems unfair to me that whites guys wanting to own guns in the US must consistently face opposition from people wielding facts about the gun havoc wrought primarily by blacks on others in society.
You aren't the only one who can now be accused of being a racist. This post is being discussed over at the white pride website Stormfront.
I agree with what you are saying, but I find it equally crazy that urban cities like DC are not able to restrict hand gun usage because of what was written into the constitution over 200 years ago. I just find it hard to believe that the founding fathers could even conceive of how we are living today, let alone that they really thought that people living in a peaceful time in a dangerous urban environment should be guaranteed the right to have a handgun.
But, overall from the data I have looked at, it doesn't appear that restricting hand guns makes much of a difference either way with regards to crime. It is a huge political issue, but I don't think the ramifications on crime, homicide and suicide rates are very large however gun laws are set.
If we want to try and reduce crime I think there are lots of areas that would have a much greater impact than restricting access to guns.
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