Thursday, March 28, 2024

CNN Shocked by Study Data Showing the Consequence of Our Own Actions, Blames Guns.

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image via Chicago Sun Times

I wrote about the study on Tuesday, the JAMA Network one. The one with the HEAT Maps showing where the fatalities were coming from. Lori Lightfoot, mayoring the mostly peaceful city of Chicago, graces this article as her city typifies some of the problems.

CNN Health also read this study, but they seem to have jumped far more alarmist than I did despite reading the same figures in the same 32 year time frame. They do an excellent job of not quite lying while describing the data, as you’ll see. They do this by constantly changing the data ranges they are comparing to always present the most dramatic contrast.

CNN my friends, the contrast is shocking enough in its raw format that we don’t need to compound the problem.

CNN — Firearm deaths surged in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic, killing a record number of people in 2021. But as America’s gun epidemic gets worse, its burden is not equal.

I pointed this out in my write-up as well, homicides and suicides are claiming vastly different lives. It is almost as if they were, at least, two separate problems.

A new study published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open analyzed firearm deaths over the past three decades – a total of more than 1 million lives lost since 1990. The researchers found that firearm mortality rates increased for most demographic groups in recent years – especially during the pandemic – and vast disparities persisted.

I wonder what they would say about firearm mortality in Europe during the 1930′ and 40’s, or 1910’s for that matter. Yes, the pandemic and the governments responses to is combined with trends in general societal civility and those government responses presented us with a bad hand.

While recent data shows some familiar patterns, the sheer scale of the issue brings the United States to a “new moment in the history of firearm fatalities,” said Dr. Eric Fleegler, a pediatric emergency physician and researcher with Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study.

Every moment is a new moment in the history of firearms fatalities. Given the analytical tone of the remainder of the study this appears to be CNN’s pick in most inflammatory quotes.

“At this moment in time, we have seen a dramatic increase that is really unparalleled,” he said. “During the time of the Covid pandemic, going from 2019 up to 2021, we’ve seen over a 25% increase in fatalities in two years alone. That has never happened.”

We have also never shut down the country the way we did and pushed people beyond the economic brink in the service industries while paying them pennies on the dollars they would have been earning. We demonized, we demanded compliance, we were lied to by omission and exaggeration and during all this stress we had violent riots in cities around the nation. There were many things that had never happened before, they culminated in a very bad period.

Violence became a more potent and valued currency as the government pulled the rug out from under the citizenry, ignored and demonized large chunks of them as politically inconvenient to shore up their short term power base, and then failed over and over again to reestablish the trust we should place in our society and its leadership. This is many problems and the longer politicians keep crafting short term win policies that erode the trust of everyone outside their fanatical political base we will keep sliding further into a very predictable period of tribalism and denial.

Overall, men are significantly more at risk. Nearly 86% of all firearm deaths since 1990 have been among men, according to the study, which used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers found that firearm homicides were highest among Black men, and firearm suicide rates were highest among senior White men.

Water still wet, yes men make up that vast majority of violent offenders and victims. They also make up the majority of suicides. As progressive a world as we pretend to live in and the soft offices jobs allow for, men still do the vast majority of hard labor and are vilified for weakness in their mental health.

Rates of firearm homicide for both men and women nearly doubled between 2014 and 2021, but men were still more than five times more likely to die than women. Rates of firearm suicide were also seven times higher among men than women in 2021, despite increasing suicide rates among women over time.

Here is where we start to see CNN jump around in their comparison groups or leaving out numbers where a number would provide stronger context. For example, ‘despite increasing suicide rates among women over time‘ would be much easier to understand if we knew what ‘over time’ and ‘increasing rates’ numbers were. A 0.5% increase between 2019 and 2021 is just as covered by the statement as a 14% increase from 1990 to present.

The racial disparities are even starker. The homicide rate among young Black men – 142 homicide deaths for every 100,000 Black men ages 20 to 24 – was nearly 10 times higher than the overall firearm death rate in the US in 2021.

But how was it compared to other firearm homicide rates or total death rates 20-24? Yes that is a shocking contrast but it is also worth noting that age range is among the most violent for males period, not just Black men, 15-29 are roughly the violent years and those who make it past are increasingly likely to mellow if they were previously violent participants.

Homicide rates among Black and Hispanic men were highest in the 20 to 24 age group. But for White men, the rate was highest in the 30 to 34 age group. When comparing these groups, the homicide rate was nearly four times higher among young Hispanic men compared with White men, and the homicide rate among young Black men was a staggering 22 times higher than among White men.

Poverty, illiteracy, broken homes, and crime as a means to provide are also highest among Black and Hispanic men in that age range while White men in the 30-34 age range will arguably have changed motive spheres. White men, and their staggeringly high suicide rate of 13 times greater than Black or Hispanic men should also bear scrutiny.

It’s almost like this is more than one problem.

We’ll skip now and just pick out a few choice bits.

Urban areas had a higher burden of firearm mortality than rural areas, too.

You don’t say.

There are two key factors driving community gun violence, says Jonathan Jay, an assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health: disadvantage at the neighborhood level and exposure to gun violence at the individual level.

“Gun violence is most likely in spaces that show signs of physical disinvestment. Sometimes that looks like unkempt, vacant lots or abandoned houses that are boarded up, maybe a high density of liquor stores and a low density of healthy food options,” he said.

I think what you are saying is that the most impoverished and already troubled areas, those that had the least margin of available resource to draw upon when the service economy got nuked by the Federal government, were also the most immediately impacted and the elements of it that were already likely to use violence as an alternative currency to currency did so. But yeah, lack of Wholefoods locations is another way to say that I suppose. These events have also occurred under the auspices of the ACAB, ‘Space to Riot’, ‘Mostly Peaceful Protests’, CHAZ, etc. where the legitimacy of state authority and justice is viewed as both weak and corrupt for various reasons by various factions and with variable levels of legitimacy to the statement.

Chicago is about to three in a row the number of years it has exceeded 700 homicides in the city. But don’t worry, a ban on semi-automatics will solve everything they promise.

In short CNN blames everything on the mere existence of firearms and cannot be bothered to puzzle out or ascribe deeper motivations to the separate problems. Also anyone who was made to feel unsafe by the combination of riots, police not responding during the lockdowns, and surge in violent crime and then went to purchase a firearm to defend themselves… they won’t say you’re actually part of the problem but they would like to heavily imply that.

There’s more beating around the bush about how the lockdowns and destruction of portions of the service economy that at risk groups relied on for income and stability absolutely triggered the increase. Turns out that if you greatly increase the stress on people who already use violence as a way to solve issues that they use that tool more and not less, even if you told them going outside was bad… unless mostly peacefully you’re protesting.

But the analysis helps identify high-risk groups that can benefit most from targeted interventions.

Hmm, right at the end we get this single line that seems to imply that this is, shockingly, more than one problem.

But because its CNN we close out with a doctor saying that kids who are injured by gunfire make him sad.

Dr. Christopher Rees, an emergency department physician at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, researcher at Emory University School of Medicine and co-author of the study, moved from Boston to Atlanta a little over a year ago. He said he’s cared for “far more” children who have been injured from firearms in Atlanta than he did in Boston – living out the trends he found in his research.

“Every single time I just think, ‘One, this is awful. Two, this is someone’s kid.’ And I immediately think about my two children at home. And then three, I think, ‘This didn’t have to happen, especially to a child,’ ” he said. “It is very personal each time.”

Thank you, Doc. Literally nobody but the most vile human beings on earth are excited when kids get hurt. I’m glad we could reiterate that point and only got a single sentence on ‘targeted interventions’, which again is code for ‘this is more than one problem.’



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