Are trauma surgeons one of the reasons that Americans don’t care more about gun violence?
Murder statistics go down year after year. Some of that is a legitimate decrease in violence. Some of it is the fact that a lot of people who would have been dead are now being kept alive by virtue of very skilled doctors. There’s a statistic I use in the book that says that if you held the level of medical care constant at 1960 levels, we’d have 75,000 homicides every year in the United States, and we have 12,000. It’s a huge difference. I don’t think we would be as blasé about homicides if there were 75,000 of them every year.
— Belinda Luscombe in Malcolm Gladwell on Why We Need More Cops and Why Assault-Rifle Bans Don’t Work
Follow the link to read the full interview. Gladwell has some, let us say, interesting assertions. One of his believes is the real purpose of the Second Amendment was so slave owners could suppress a slave uprising.
We’re pretty blasé about heart disease that kills 680,000 each year.
Hell, we basically encourage it with all the crap food, endless consooomerism, stationary past times and labelling fitness a a neo-fascist pursuit of white supremacy.
This is like whiners bitching about surveillance all while carrying a phone everywhere they go.
Get America to stop encouraging or at least stop excusing factors that lead to heart disease then maybe, just maybe, I’ll entertain your homicide concerns.
1. The gun community isn’t “blase” WRT homicides. In a country of almost 400M people, even 75k would be an anomaly (0.02%).
2. Something like 75-90% of homicides occur in a handful of zip codes. This is not a universal problem across America.
The article states: The overwhelming amount of gun violence is young people arguing with each other and using guns to resolve some grievance or exact revenge (as opposed to committing a crime)
Presuming for a moment that “young people” are younger than 18 (the age at which you become an adult..), there are already “laws” prohibiting possession by a minor (which could be Consitutionally questionable), thus the crime has already been committed…
This is like saying an “illegal immigrant has broken no laws”.
“There’s a statistic I use in the book . . .”
– Malcolm Gladwell
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. ”
– Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain
And, if we removed the Top 5 Democrat-controlled cities from the statistics, America would be views as the “safest” country on earth. But, alas.