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This should be non-controversial information that you’re sharing because I can verify it’s again 100% accurate, but we all know that almost no where in media is that information broken down. Not even with the necessary additions that historical racism may have led to such outcomes.
Yet the media and government mostly hides these facts. This leads to constipation in the body politic. From the lack of questioning around New Year’s Eve assaults in Germany to 1400 youth sexually exploited in England to the Black Lives Matter in the U.S., you can see how dangerous this political correctness is when we get Brexit and Trump emerge on the sphincter end of these events. These are results I’m personally not happy about. They’re shitty to me. When you throttle the truth and freedom of speech, it tends to explode in unexpected ways. (Pardon the visual imagery.)
I can’t tell you how many times people assume that a disproportionate percentage of mass shooters are non-Hispanic white males. Or that a disproportionate percentage of terrorists are white right-wingers. Factually, both those are 100% untrue. Asians are the group that has a disproportionately high number of mass shooters and Muslims have a disproportionately high number of terrorist killers. Of course, those bad apples are a tiny, minuscule fraction of those demographics.
But as a result, you get an eruption of anti-white rhetoric that pushes people into the hands of ideologues like Trump.
According to CNN shortly after the 2015 shootings, 16% of mass shooters were black (13% of the population). People often point to the Las Vegas shootings in 2017 that killed 58 and injured well over 500 was committed by a non-terrorist mass shooting by a mysteriously deranged millionaire white gambler (with no known ideology). “These shooters are almost exclusively coming from a single socio-economic class and racial group,” people think, but even the liberal Slate wrote a corrective, “Mass Shooters Aren’t Disproportionately White.” His horrible actions may skew the percentages slightly, but not by much as we have so many mass shootings annually. Mass shooting deaths are also well under 10% of annual murders. Experts in the CNN article basically say blacks and whites commit mass shootings in proportion to their population.
“If you look at the whole list, it turns out that whites and blacks are pretty proportionate to their population, very close,” said Dave Cullen, author of the book “Columbine,” which tells the story of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Harris and Klebold, the shooters there, were white.
Historically, Latinos and Asians have been the exception.
The Virginia Tech massacre was carried out by Seung-Hui Cho, who was born in South Korea.
“Latinos are almost nowhere to be seen,” Cullen told CNN’s “New Day.” “Asians continue to be heavily overrepresented — more than 2½ times their size in the population.”
Again, we have to talk PROPORTIONALITY and PROBABILITY when discussing existential threats from violence. When non-Hispanic whites are 63% of the population and slightly more than 25% of the murderers in this country, it really gets to the heart of the issue.
My personal world vision is the murder rate cut in half by 2050 (let’s say 7,0000 total) and proportional to every demographic in society. I won’t be naive that women will be 50% of murderers and those committing crime; but then again, we tend to overlook women when dissecting disproportionate outcomes from, say, police killings. I accept that racism by non-European whites in the past played a huge part in the cultural and institutional problems we have today. Yet after 50 years since Jim Crow and red-lining — and the ensuing heavy injection of civil rights laws, welfare and government healthcare for the poor — are there other factors that continually plague communities ravaged by violence?
Either way, we need to stop perpetuating fears of state-sanctioned violence and KKK-style racism when a blacks are 31 times more likely to be killed by another black man than the police. (For whites they’re 7 times more likely to be killed by another white person than by police.) Additionally, hate crime killings represent around 1 in 2000 murders annually averaging just 8 per year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
I also wrote this after Charlottesville to contextualize what the mainstream media was absolutely ignoring or distorting. Highlights below the link.
This past weekend I once again found far too many posts, articles and Tweets that are completely disingenuous by placing the domestic terrorism problem more heavily on right-wing ideology. They dishonestly leave out the murder total. They will say there were 62 attacks committee by right-wing extremists compared to jihadists’ meager total of 23 since 9/11, and get nearly 30,000 shares of that misleading fact. Knowledge gatekeepers flub on MSNBC using that same source information and confuse total deaths with total incidents as high-paid pundits incorrectly nod their heads in agreement. I have intelligent well-informed friends saying there’s 10 times more right-wing terrorism attacks than jihadist. Social networks are exploding about this “white”-wing Nazi reign of terror. Surprise, I buried the lead: Jihadists have killed more people. You can drop the ideological axe-grinding now.
I understand because despite what left-leaning propaganda tells you about right-wing terror, along with a slew of mainstream news stories the last couple years, the mortal threat on U.S. soil between both extremist categories is mostly equivalent the past 15 years. The average chance of being killed by either ideological menace is incredibly small, around 5–8 deaths out of 16,000 total homicides annually. The major blind-spot my fellow liberals have and that I question is this point: The rate of Islamic extremist (jihadist) murder is anywhere from 40 to 100 times higher than far-right-extremism when contextualizing for demographics, which even Snopes doesn’t mention. Frankly, few news sources do. It’s easy to understand why. No one wants accusations of racism or fomenting hatred, even if reporting facts and context. This is a false dichotomy.
GAO Terrorism Statistics
Yes, there are 62 far-right-wing incidents to 23 jihadist incidents, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. A far more relevant fact omitted in this Tweet and elsewhere is that there are 119 jihadist deaths compared to 106 right-wing deaths in the 15 years after the September 11 attacks.
New America Foundation Terrorism Statistics
What do other sources say for the same 15-year period since non-resident foreign terrorists killed 2,974 victims on 9/11? Indeed, experts debate on what the threshold is to count each incident as terrorism, and attributable to which ideology. Still, I found the numbers from the two reputable sources I’m using here to be in similar ballparks. (The Anti-Defamation League exaggerates the right-wing threat, and I’ll get there in a minute.)
According to the widely used non-partisan New America Foundation analysis, which is updated regularly, there have been:
* 95 jihadist terror killings since 9/11 (includes Orlando nightclub shooting)
* 68 right-wing (mostly white) terror killings since 9/11 (includes Charleston church shooting and last Saturday’s Charlottesville vehicular attack)
* 8 black separatist (formerly “left-wing”) terror killings since 9/11 (includes Dallas police sniper shooting)
Population Differences
From these population pools, extremists spring forth willing to kill because of hate. The first two bullets below one could argue make up the “right-wing” group, and the last bullet would indicate the “jihadist” group. Trump partisans could also overlap with the first two groups, and hate crimes are often pinned on Trump voters and the alt-right.
* There are about 50% of Americans who are white and Christian
* There are about 35% of Americans who are right-wing/conservative
* 1% of Americans are Muslim
SOURCE (35% of Americans consider themselves “Conservative”): http://www.gallup.com/poll/201152/conservative-liberal-gap-continues-narrow-tuesday.aspx
SOURCE (46% of Americans are white and Christian):
http://time.com/4124979/white-christian-pew-survey/’SOURCE (1% of the American population are Muslim):
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/06/a-new-estimate-of-the-u-s-muslim-population/