Vox is wrong – we don’t have too many guns, we have too many criminals

One of my followers on G+ asked me to comment on a Vox article,

What no politician wants to admit about gun control.

I’ve studied the evidence, and I don’t believe the effect of the Australian confiscation on homicides was significant.  You can play games with statistics to make it look that way, but they are games.

As for the major contention of the article, it’s simply wrong.  80% of U.S. crime, including gun violence, is associated with the drug trade and happens in urban areas where civil order has partially or totally collapsed.

Outside those areas, the U.S. looks like Switzerland or Norway – lots of guns, very little crime.  Those huge, peaceful swathes of high-gun-ownership areas show that our problem is not too many guns, it’s too many criminals.

The reason nobody at Vox or anywhere in the punditosphere wants to admit this is because of the racial angle.  The high-crime, high-violence areas of the U.S. are populated by blacks (who, at 12.5% of the population, commit 50% of index violent crimes).  The low-crime, lots-of-guns areas are white.

The predictively correct observation would be that in the U.S., lots of legal weapons owned by white people doesn’t produce high levels of gun violence any more than they do in Switzerland or Norway.   The U.S. has extraordinarily high levels of gun violence because American blacks (and to a lesser extent American Hispanics and other non-white, non-Asian minorities) are extraordinarily lawless.  As in, Third-World tribal badlands levels of lawless.

Nobody wants to be honest about this except a handful of evil scumbag racists (and me).  Thus, the entire policy discussion around U.S. firearms is pretty much fucked from the word go.

What would I do about it? Well, since I’m not an evil scumbag racist and in fact believe all laws and regulations should be absolutely colorblind, I would start by legalizing all drugs.  Then we could watch gun violence drop by 80% and look for the next principal driver.