NYT: Blacks Shooting Blacks In Large Numbers
05/22/2016
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Hillary is currently running for President on how we must have more gun control to save innocent black baby bodies from racist Republican white males hunting them down for sport:

… Clinton addressed a fundraising dinner organized by the Trayvon Martin Foundation, … “If you want to imagine what Trump’s America would look like, picture more kids at risk of violence and bigotry,” Clinton said.
In the real world, however, the big story is blacks shooting blacks. From the NYT:
Untold Damage: America’s Overlooked Gun Violence

Most shootings with four deaths or injuries are invisible outside their communities. And most of the lives they scar are black.

By SHARON LAFRANIERE, DANIELA PORAT and AGUSTIN ARMENDARIZ MAY 22, 2016

CINCINNATI — After the slaughter of nine worshipers at a South Carolina church last June, but before the massacre of eight students and a teacher at an Oregon community college in October, there was a shooting that the police here have labeled Incident 159022597.01. It happened on a clear Friday night at an Elks Lodge, on a modest block of clapboard houses northeast of this city’s hilly downtown. Unlike the butchery that bookended it, it merited no presidential statements, no saturation television coverage.

But what took place at 6101 Prentice Street on Aug. 21 may say more about the nature of gun violence in the United States than any of those far more famous rampages. It is a snapshot of a different sort of mass violence — one that erupts with such anesthetic regularity that it is rendered almost invisible, except to the mostly black victims, survivors and attackers.

According to the police account, more than 30 people had gathered in the paneled basement bar of the lodge to mark the 39th birthday of a man named Greg Wallace when a former neighbor, Timothy Murphy, showed up, drunk.

Jill Leovy’s 2015 book Ghettoside mentions “unwanted party guests” as a common cause of murder.
Fists flew. Mr. Murphy ducked out the door, burst back in with a handgun, and opened fire.

As partygoers scrambled for the door, he chased Greg Wallace’s younger brother Dawaun to a tiny black-and-white-tiled bathroom, where he shot him nine times before the violence spilled out onto the street. There, another Wallace relative, also armed with a handgun, fired back at him.

By the end, 27 bullets had flown, hitting seven people: Mr. Murphy, who died; Dawaun Wallace, who was grievously wounded; four bystanders, one of whom was hit in the genitals, another in the leg.

And Barry Washington.

A seasonal packer for Amazon.com, Mr. Washington, 56, had stopped at the lodge on his way to the store for cigarettes, said his sister, Jaci Washington. He was in the bathroom when Mr. Murphy cornered Dawaun Wallace there. A single bullet pierced Mr. Washington’s arm, then his heart.

He left behind a son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, a mother and four grandchildren.

“My brother died on the floor of a bathroom for no reason,” Ms. Washington said. “He had nothing to do with the whole situation. I can’t believe I lost my brother like this.”

Yet many in the neighborhood where they grew up, she said, responded with a shrug. “The reality is, this happens quite frequently,” she said. “And it’s kind of, ‘Oh, well, this guy was killed today. Somebody else will be killed tomorrow.’ ”

That is more than correct. The Elks Lodge episode was one of at least 358 armed encounters nationwide last year — nearly one a day, on average — in which four or more people were killed or wounded, including attackers. The toll: 462 dead and 1,330 injured, sometimes for life, typically in bursts of gunfire lasting but seconds. …

74% of the victims survived, which suggests most of these shootings were conducted by non-suicidal shooters. Columbine-type shootings tend to be deadlier because the shooters are willing to be caught or die so they take time to finish off their victims. These kind of Unwanted Party Guest mass shootings, in contrast, aren’t usually suicidal in intent — at some point the shooter flees, hoping to escape punishment, leaving a lot of wounded survivors behind.

Suicidal mass shootings can be divided into two categories: domestic, which don’t get much publicity, and the Columbine-type, which get immense coverage. The latter go on longer than the non-suicidal mass shootings, which sometimes allow for television coverage as they are happening, they probably have increased in numbers over the last two generations, and they generate a lot of metacoverage about what to do about them. But they are still quite rare, fortunately.

Seeking deeper insight into the phenomenon, The New York Times identified and analyzed 358 shootings with four or more casualties, drawing on two databases assembled from news reports and citizen contributors, and then verifying details with law enforcement agencies.

Only a small handful were high-profile mass shootings like those in South Carolina and Oregon. The rest are a pencil sketch of everyday America at its most violent.

They chronicle how easily lives are shattered when a firearm is readily available — in a waistband, a glove compartment, a mailbox or garbage can that serves as a gang’s gun locker. They document the mayhem spawned by the most banal of offenses: a push in a bar, a Facebook taunt, the wrong choice of music at a house party….

The shootings took place everywhere, but mostly outdoors: at neighborhood barbecues, family reunions, music festivals, basketball tournaments, movie theaters, housing project courtyards, Sweet 16 parties, public parks. Where motives could be gleaned, roughly half involved or suggested crime or gang activity. Arguments that spun out of control accounted for most other shootings, followed by acts of domestic violence.

The divide is racial as well. Among the cases examined by The Times were 39 domestic violence shootings, and they largely involved white attackers and victims. So did many of the high-profile massacres, including a wild shootout between Texas biker gangs that left nine people dead and 18 wounded.

This article treats Hispanics as white.
Over all, though, nearly three-fourths of victims and suspected assailants whose race could be identified were black. Some experts suggest that helps explain why the drumbeat of dead and wounded does not inspire more outrage.

“Clearly, if it’s black-on-black, we don’t get the same attention because most people don’t identify with that. Most Americans are white,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston. “People think, ‘That’s not my world. That’s not going to happen to me.’”

Michael Nutter, a former Philadelphia mayor, who is black, said that society would not be so complacent if whites were dying from gun violence at the same rate as blacks.
To be more precise, if it were whites killing blacks at high rates, it would be the Biggest Story Ever. Blacks killing blacks is just awkward for the Narrative.
Droves of experts study high-profile massacres by so-called lone-wolf assailants, usually driven by mental disorders, at schools, workplaces and other public spaces. Academics regularly crunch data on single homicides and assaults. But the near-daily shootings that wound or kill several victims — a relatively small subset of the shootings that kill nearly 11,000 people and wound roughly 60,000 more each year — are uncharted territory for researchers, said Richard B. Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. …

Counting assailants among casualties increased the total number of cases by fewer than three dozen, most of them domestic violence shootings that ended in suicide. Hispanics were not separately identified, because police reports do not systematically identify victims and suspects by ethnicity, only by race.

And that would complicate the Narrative even worse.
There are 358 reasons for those 358 shootings, though some remain a mystery; in about a fourth of the cases, investigators have discerned no motive.

As for the rest, some patterns stand out. The fewest occurred while another felony, such as a burglary, was underway. Domestic violence shootings were nearly as infrequent, but were among the deadliest.

About a third were provoked by arguments, typically drug- or alcohol-fueled, often over petty grievances.

A sampling:

Outside a crowded bar in Decatur, Ill., a customer found an expensive watch. When another man insisted it was his, the customer pulled out a semiautomatic handgun, shot the man in the face and wounded four people near him.

After a day of drinking, singing karaoke and watching football, four middle-aged friends in a small town north of Baton Rouge, La., got into a fight — some said over the choice of music. One shot the other three, then killed himself.

Outside an Orlando, Fla., housing project, lewd comments about a young man’s pregnant girlfriend resulted in 15 to 20 gunshots. A 10-year-old boy who peered out his window at the fracas was struck directly in one eye. One of three wounded adults later acknowledged that “a one-on-one fist fight would have settled the issue,” the police report said.

You can have a culture of settling beefs with with words, with fists, with knives, or with guns. The last is most likely to get bystanders killed or wounded. Settling disputes with guns can be done cowboy style with duels or just by opening fire in the general direction of somebody you are mad at. How much of the current black cultural predilection for grabbing a gun when dissed and letting loose stems from memes transmitted and reinforced by the gangsta rap that emerged around 1988?
Another third of the 358 cases — and the most common in cities with more than 250,000 residents — were either gang-related or were drive-by shootings typical of gangs.

But the police and prosecutors say many of those were not directly linked to criminal activity, such as a dispute over a drug deal. More often, a minor dust-up — a boast, an insult, a decision to play basketball on another gang’s favorite court — was taken as a sign of disrespect and answered with a bullet, said Andrew V. Papachristos, a Yale University professor who studies gang behavior. …

The Elks Lodge shooting was one of five last year in Cincinnati that resulted in at least four casualties. The others took place on street corners, on a front porch and at a cookout in a parking lot.

Police officials say they suspect that as many as half of the 24 victims were not the intended targets; community workers blame self-taught gunmen who are often high on drugs or were drunk. “They are not marksmen,” said Aaron Pullins, an anti-violence worker. “They don’t know how to hold the gun. They just shoot.”

Investigators have linked three of those shootings to gangs, although like many of their counterparts in other cities, they say the word gang conjures up a false image of a tight-knit, hierarchical criminal organization. Instead, they describe fluid, sometimes tiny bands of teenagers and young adults bound by illegal activity. “They are groups of friends who rob and shoot each other,” Detective Greg Gehring said. “That’s just what they do.” …

Some researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates is the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they say, is merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic disadvantages that help breed violence.

Mr. Nutter, now an urban policy professor at Columbia University, spoke out repeatedly about the disparity during his eight years as Philadelphia’s mayor — and was accused of casting African-Americans in a bad light. “Some people got upset,” he said. “I said, ‘I’ll stop talking about it when you stop killing each other.’ ”

Cloaking the issue, he said, only makes it easier for the country to tune out what amounts to “mass murder occurring in slow motion every day.” Both he and Mr. Abdullah say they wish some of the outrage over police killings of unarmed African-Americans would spill over to victims who die in anonymity in routine gun violence.

After a white University of Cincinnati police officer fatally shot an unarmed black driver in July, street protests erupted here, Mr. Abdullah noted. But “when we kill each other,” he said, “it seems an acceptable way of life.”

This article reinforces the view offered by L.A. Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy in her 2015 book “Ghettoside” that legalizing drugs wouldn’t do much to reduce the large numbers of blacks shooting blacks. Leovy argued that main hope for changing black culture from the outside is through the cops increasing the clearance rate by getting more blacks to testify against black shooters. This would require spending more tax money on detectives and on witness relocation programs.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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