John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, is in a state of high dudgeon over President Obama's remarks regarding mass murder at the church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week. The post is called "Barack Obama Disgraces Himself Again." You will recall that the President said that other countries don't have these sickening catastrophes with anything like the frequency with which Americans endure them. Here is Hinderaker, from midflight to soft landing:
Murder is a terrible thing, but thankfully, the homicide rate in the United States is dropping. It was lower in 2014 than in 2013, and lower in 2013 than in 2012. Today, it is only about half what it was during the Clinton administration. In the intervening years, private handgun ownership has exploded. Many argue, and statistics support the claim, that broader gun ownership has contributed to this stunning reduction in the homicide rate.
[Snip]
“Mass violence” happens in lots of countries; more important, the homicide rate in the U.S. is about average, ranking higher than some western countries that have less demographic diversity, but much lower than Russia, most of Africa, the Caribbean, and most of Latin America. The assertion that we have a unique problem with “gun violence” is simply false.
Obama does not specify, naturally, how we should “shift how we think about gun violence collectively.” He is just trying to fire up his base, not to achieve anything constructive. But here is an idea: news reports indicate that South Carolina law prohibits carrying concealed firearms in churches. The one thing that undoubtedly could have stopped the deranged and reportedly drug-addled Dylann Roof is a couple of parishioners with guns. Somehow, though, I don’t suppose that is the “shift” that Obama had in mind.
Operating on the theory that if the facts and figures were on his side Hinderaker would set them down, I did a few simple Internet searches. First, let's consider the claims relating to the "stunning reduction in the homicide rate." If you google "homicide rates in the U.S. by year," the first return, from disastercenter.com, a compilation of data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, provides comprehensive U.S. crime statistics for the years 1960-2013. For the first first four years of the current decade, the number of homicides in the U.S. were, coming forward from 2010: 14,772; 14,661; 14,866; and 14,196. To discern an optimistic trend in these numbers, you have to be determined.
But of course Hinderaker's real argument is longer term: "Today, [the homicide rate] is only about half of what it was during the Clinton administration." This turns out to be rather artfully phrased, unless you want to go so far as to say that Hinderaker is lying. What the data show is that there has been over the past generation a significant decline in the homicide rate, and that this decline is confined almost entirely to the years that Clinton was president. Here are the details:
Clinton was elected in November of 1992. That year, the U.S. homicide rate was 9.3 per 100,000 population. For the years of his Presidency, the figures were as follows:
1993 (9.5)
1994 (9.0)
1995 (8.2)
1996 (7.4)
1997 (6.8)
1998 (6.3)
1999 (5.7)
2000 (5.5)
Now there's a trend. Then George W became president and the dramatic gains ceased. In the eight years of his Presidency, the rate went from 5.6 to 5.4. For the last several years, it's been pretty steadily just below 5.0.
It's pretty well known that the economy was humming during the Clinton years and that W. then steered into the ground, so perhaps there is a connection between economic health and lower homicide rates? Not according to Hinderaker. He attributes the decline to an "explosion" in gun ownership. What about that? According to Gallup, he's full of it: since 1992, the percentage of Americans answering Yes to the question "Do you have a gun in your home" has gone from the high 40s to the low 40s. If there has been an "explosion" in gun ownership, then, it's because those people who have one are now assembling arsenals. But, since Hinderaker does not advise worshipers to bring lots of guns to church, it doesn't seem that this trend helps his case.
Finally, regarding the claim that the U.S. homicide rate is "about average": this is defensible if you include the third world. If you compare our homicide rate to that of, say, Canada or Japan or any of the countries of the European Union to which we have the closest historical and cultural ties, you'll see that our rate is off the chart. Try googling "Deaths by gun violence per capita by country." Possibly the President has done that. If Hinderaker has, he's trying to conceal what you discover.
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