• AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Conservatives love to quote the statistic that many blue counties have a higher total number of gun deaths than red counties. What they hope you don’t notice is that those blue counties are also the most populous. If you normalize the statistics per capita, those blue counties become far and away the safest areas of the country. The deep south has the highest rate of gun violence per capita.

    Edit: Capita, not capital (my keyboard keeps changing it)

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Not really, it’s difficult to utilize. A town of 50k people who had a familicide that had 4 deaths makes their murder rate 8 in 100k… while a city with 1mil can have 80 murders and have the same per capita. It doesn’t make the city safer magically…there is still other crime that happens.

        Trying to compare rural areas and cities on gun violence is stupid anyways. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that gang and drug violence makes up the majority of our gun homicides and because more people are in cities and that’s where most gangs are… they’re going to have more violence and death…

        • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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          11 months ago

          Let me see if I understand the argument here: gang and drug violence is magically somehow worse, and the victims somehow more deader than the family members? I dunno, sounds pretty sus. Like “gang and drug” is maybe code for something.

          An argument about stochasticity would be more sensible, but if the town of 50 thousand has an average murder rate of about 4 per year over a period of many years, then it has exactly the same per capita rate of violence and death as the city, feelings about the perps notwithstanding. The city might even feel safer to the people living there, because drug and gang violence tends to be highly localized and predictable, unlike a guy walking into a bowling alley in a small town on a random night and blowing people away.

          • shalafi@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            LiberalGunNut™ here! I see a great deal on both sides of the gun issue, I’m more than a little familiar.

            “Gang violence” is often a straight-up dog whistle that says, “Black and Hispanic kids blowing each other away doesn’t really count.”

            While I don’t think we should be talking like this, it’s not always the dig whistle. Some well-meaning people say it to emphasize the idea that gun violence is not nearly so random as the media implies. Cute little white girl catches a stray round? National news. 5 black kids smoke each other in South Chicago? Might not make the local news.

            Point being, the second scenario is not random. Those people choose that life. (I’d also argue it was thrust on them by poverty and poor education, but that’s a whole other rant.)

            Still, I don’t want to be painted with the racist brush, so I stay far away from that rhetoric.

            And BTW, calling out ~47% of gun deaths as suicides serves much the same purpose, with the same touch of disingenuousness. No one’s saying those are not tragic, but they’re not random and can be avoided.

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            If you’re not able to comprehend that a large city with the same murder rate as a small town based off per capita numbers isn’t the same when it comes to violent crimes…I don’t know what to tell you.

            The city might even feel safer to the people living there, because drug and gang violence tends to be highly localized and predictable, unlike a guy walking into a bowling alley in a small town on a random night and blowing people away.

            Do you even know what familicide is???

            • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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              11 months ago

              This just make any sense, so of course I don’t understand. The same per capita violent crime rate between a big city and a small city by definition means the same risk of being the victim of a violent crime in both places, despite whether one feels scarier than the other.

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                But it doesn’t, one is localized to a single family unit, the other effects random people.

                • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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                  11 months ago

                  The only difference, though, is feelings. If it’s famicide, you can convince yourself it doesn’t affect you because your family wouldn’t kill you. Coincidentally, I just read an article about Kip Kinkel the other day. His parents also didn’t think he’d kill them, yet it happened. From a big picture perspective, famicide is random. But for 4 murders in a city of 50,000 people, the odds are ever in your favor that it won’t be you.

                  And, here’s the thing: Even though a city of 5 million people has 200 murders in a year (same rate of 8 per 100,000), it also will not be you, or anybody you know. (That’s with assuming that the murders were distributed randomly through the population, which they are most certainly not.) It’s easier to feel endangered by 200 murders, because that’s a number that the human brain can process, and 5 million is much, much too large for it. Based on the odds, though, there’s as much chance that somebody in your family will kill you as a big-city stranger will. And, those odds are almost nil.

                  (My city has a rate half that, around 4 per 100,000, and in all the decades that I’ve lived here, it’s never been anybody I know, and only once it was a friend of a friend. The victim of a famicide, actually.)

        • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          It makes you no more statistically likely to get murdered in one over the other. It may seem counterintuitive on a surface level because 80 is more than 4, but 1 million is also more than 50k.

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            No it doesn’t, because in small towns usually it’s domestic violence, in inner cities it’s usually gang/drug violence that effects everyone.

            • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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              7 months ago

              And domestic violence only effects… checks notes oh yeah, everyone! Seriously, what kind of argument is that? Are you not aware of how widespread and common domestic violence is in both rural and urban areas and how much it contributes to gun violence and homicide rates?

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Yea it’s about 1-1.5k murders via firearms a year. But it’s not something that randomly happens from people you don’t know. Gang and drug violence does. I don’t know why you seem to think less violence happens in the cities than rural areas. This is just stupid.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You mean “per capita” (per head, i.e., per person).

      Gun violence “per capital” (gun violence divided by number of capital cities) wouldn’t do much except make these six countries look good in comparison since they get to divide by a number larger than one.

  • unoriginalsin@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    If you think for one instant they’re not using “Democrats” as a code word, then you don’t understand racists.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Here are the premises that led to this:

      1. All black people are Democrats.
      2. All criminals are Democrats.
      3. All shootings are done by people easily categorized in one of the above groups.

      None of this is true, but it’s what led here.

  • fsxylo
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    11 months ago

    “90% sounds like a big, believable number, right? Let’s go with that!”

  • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    God, this reminds me of something that just happened last week. I got a letter in the mail from the HR outsourcing company an old job used. They got hacked and my personal info was leaked. I mentioned it to my mom, and she said something like “I can’t wait for democrats to all die so shit that that stops happening.”.

    …Fucking what?

  • Something_Complex@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I’m about to start, should I save the ammo and let climate change do the trick instead?

    Regular though in my head ( dw I’m from a no guns country)

  • Tsavo43@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    The other 10% are conservative… It’s not 0 like you suggest, math isn’t hard.

    • otp
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      11 months ago

      Not only did you miss the point of the post, but you didn’t understand the crux of the fallacy being made by the person in the image.

      The person who made the post is against the argument in the image. They made this post to ridicule the argument being made in the image.

      The issue with the argument being made in the image is that it ignores gun violence per capita, which is a much more meaningful descriptor rather than raw numbers.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, yeah, both sides are the same. One wants to control women’s healthcare, promotes literal fascism, wants to give tax breaks to billionaires, denies climate change, and resists any sort of gun control, no matter how widely popular. The other wants to give free healthcare, protect the planet from climate change, and enact some basic gun control measures. I can see why they blur together to you.

        • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Obamacare wasn’t supposed to be free healthcare. It was designed to offer a government alternative to for-profit healthcare that forced private entities to compete with a group that didn’t care about profit. Universal Healthcare has never been a policy of any major party in America despite its overwhelming popularity and the fact that it has been done in the vast, vast majority of first world nations. Neither Clinton nor Biden ran on universal healthcare

          It’s really easy to beat a strawman in a fight my guy, why don’t you try backing up your criticisms with evidence?

            • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              You can’t just say a legitimate argument is invalid because you think it is. That’s not what executive orders do. First and foremost they couldn’t even wipe away 10k of student loan debt via executive order without the courts striking it down, you think he can just wave a hand and make a 1.6 trillion dollar industry disappear overnight? Even if that was in his power, you need a whole plan to phase out private insurance, phase in government programs to replace them, find funding, staff, buildings, and all the other stuff. The president runs the executive branch, which is in charge of the day to day running of the country. What you’re suggesting is likely a 15 year+ program which is congress’ responsibility to arrange and fund. Also, anything accomplished via executive order can be undone just as easily by one, so if a petulant manchild ends up in office they could undo all that day 1, so it has no long term viability.

              Finally, this is exactly the shit we’re irritated about. I don’t like democrats! I don’t like Biden! However, I have to sit here and defend minutia about how he’s running things, the specifics of his policy, justify inaction, and more while his primary competition suggests people inject bleach, spends more time in court than out of it, has openly declared his intention to become a dictator, and actively tried to overthrow the government. Why is this a conversation? One guy sucks and the other is an actual threat to our democracy, this shouldn’t be a debate

          • Tinidril@midwest.social
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            11 months ago

            Obamacare wasn’t supposed to be free healthcare. It was designed to offer a government alternative to for-profit healthcare

            Well, it didn’t do that either. What it did do (along with some seriously good things) is make the health insurance industry a whole lot more profitable. Of course it’s middle class Americans paying for it. It also capped profits and expenses as a percentage of premiums. That was purportedly to contain costs, but instead it means they need to spend more on healthcare to make more profits. Suddenly, healthcare became big business too. Wall Street is buying up all the providers and starting to turn the screws on doctors, nurses, and patients. The whole healthcare system is going to shit, and it’s happening fast.

            The reforms of the ACA were sorely needed, but they were a temporary fix. For profit healthcare is a complete and total failure, and even a public option wouldn’t have changed that. The Democratic establishment is standing in the way of real reform just as much as the Republican establishment. Biden is among the worst of either party on this issue.

        • Dale@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          You might be interested to know that Obamacare was originally Clinton’s plan and the Obama administration finished the job

            • otp
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              11 months ago

              I can’t understand the “2 sides of the same coin” argument. Are you not paying attention?

              One party makes slow progress towards improving things. The other party rapidly destroys things and is proud of it.

              It feels like the “both sides” argument stems from things not being perfect, so “I’m not going to consider nuance, just the fact that things aren’t perfect”.

              • Tinidril@midwest.social
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                11 months ago

                I guess we’re gonna have a bunch of surprised pikachu faces again when the next Fascist is elected.

              • Tinidril@midwest.social
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                11 months ago

                Ican’t understand the “2 sides of the same coin” argument. Are you not paying attention?

                Maybe asking someone who actually made that argument would get you a better answer, but sure, I’ll give it a go.

                One party makes slow progress towards improving things.

                Nonsense. The Democratic establishment throws the people a bone when they have to, but they are elitists who serve what they perceive to be the elite class. Every solution they offer, first and foremost, guarantees a massive cash flow into the pockets of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the billionaire class. They will never acknowledge that any adversarial relationship exists between working Americans and the ultra wealthy. Every solution caters to power and keeps the proles poor but docile.

                The last several decades of Democrats slowly making things better have resulted in most things getting far worse for most Americans. The fundamental problem is the wealthy have been waging a class war, and the Democrats won’t even acknowledge it. That is what was behind the massive “Anybody but Bernie” effort in 2020.

                We are in a “emperor has no clothes” situation. Lots of Americans have seen through the Democratic finery and the “just not perfect” obfuscations. Generally speaking, those that understand the dynamics behind what they are seeing are the left wing progressives, and those that don’t are the far right fascists.

                Wherever neoliberalism and technocratic elitism go, fascism is never far behind. We have seen it for over a century,and it’s playing out over and over all around the globe. Neoliberals aren’t fascists, but they plant the seeds.

                • otp
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                  11 months ago

                  The fundamental problem is the wealthy have been waging a class war, and the Democrats won’t even acknowledge it.

                  The Democrats won’t even acknowledge it. The Republicans are leading the other side.

    • centof@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I agree both parties are shit. It is just a matter of picking the less shitty option.

      Calling someone an idiot isn’t gonna change anyone’s mind. It will just make them dislike you.

      I don’t think subscribing to a party is necessarily a bad move when party primary are usually the deciding factor on who actually eventually gets into office.

      With that being said, I do think there is a difference between someone who is a fanatic for a party and always listens and defends the party line, and someone who doesn’t agree with a party on everything but still leans toward a certain party because they are more in line with their views. I would suspect that the more reasonable people fall into the second group while the first group is the more emotional group who always follow the party line because they identify with their party and not their parties views.