Posted on 04/02/2013 8:56:34 AM PDT by End Times Sentinel
IMAGINE if African-American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we'd have political debates demanding that African-Americans be "held accountable."
But when the criminals and leaders are white men, race and gender become the elephant in the room.
Nearly all the mass shootings in this country in recent years have been committed by white men and boys.
Unlike other groups, white men are not used to being singled out. So we expect that many of them will protest that it is unfair if we talk about them. But our nation must correctly define their contribution to our problem of gun violence if it is to be solved.
When white men try to divert attention from gun control by talking about mental-health issues, many people buy into the idea that the United States has a national mental-health problem, or flawed systems with which to address those problems, and they think that is what produces mass shootings.
But women and girls with mental-health issues are not picking up semiautomatic weapons and shooting schoolchildren. Immigrants with mental-health issues are not committing mass shootings in malls and movie theaters. Latinos with mental-health issues are not continually killing groups of strangers.
Each of us is programmed from childhood to believe that the top group of our hierarchies - and in the U.S. culture, that's white men - represents everyone, so it can feel awkward, even ridiculous, when we try to call attention to those people as a distinct group and hold them accountable.
For example, our schools teach American history as the history of everyone in this nation. But the stories we learn are predominantly about white men. To study the history of other groups, people have to take separate classes, such as African-American history, women's history or Native American history. This societal and cultural programming makes it easy for conservative, white-male-led groups to convince the nation that an organization led by white men, such as the National Rifle Association or the tea-party movement, can represent the interests of the entire nation when, in fact, they predominately represent only their own experiences and perspectives.
If life were equitable, white-male gun-rights advocates would face some serious questions to assess their degree of credibility and objectivity. We would expect them to explain: What facets of white-male culture create so many mass shootings? Why are so many white men and boys producing and entertaining themselves with violent video games and other media? Why do white men buy, sell and manufacture guns for profit; attend gun shows; and demonstrate for unrestricted gun access disproportionately more than people of other ethnicities or races? Why are white-male congressmen leading the fight against gun control?
If Americans ask the right questions on gun issues, we will get the right answers. These answers will encourage white men to examine their role in their own culture and to help other white men and boys become healthier and less violent.
The names Jiverly Wong, Eduardo Scencion, Chai Vang, Sueng Chi Ho, Omar Shariff Thornton, Jennifer San Marco, Colin Ferguson, and Jing Hua Wu immediately jump to mind.
Gangs commit the vast majority of murders.
Yeah the white gangs are running rampant in the cities.
Unthankfully, there is empirical proof of the truth or falsity of that contention.
Cool - so we can now start talking openly about race and crime stats?
lol... doubtful....
What? There is a mass murder by white guys month after month....how come we don’t hear about them?
Guess not because we do not hear about blacks killing blacks by the thousands every year either.
If “white maleness” causes mass murders,
then why aren’t there more mass murders?
So, the correlation fails.
Mental illness causes mass murders, correlation positive.
And there are even more. In fact, if you list them all, it’s yet another crime category in which minorities commit the crime at disproportionate levels, (and so is serial murder), while the white rate is proportional to the white population.
Another of N reasons (where N is a large number) why journalists should just leave math alone. It is not their friend. It is just too complicated for their diminutive minds to comprehend.
(Snarkiness aside, there exists a very good rebuke of this silliness - which involves pretty much the most simplistic approach one has to take when doing statistical analysis. I just saw it today and one can find it easily.)
“..IMAGINE if African-American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year...”
Imagine??? think Chicago, Detroit, and most every other major city!!
What about the Fort Hood guy? Francis X O’Toole, I think?
Black on black murders are through the roof. Imagine if the black population was equal to the whites.
And this fool of an author dares lectures us?
I guess they can conveniently forget the black guys who were shooting innocent people from the trunk of their car on the east coast?
John Muhammad.
White males commit 70% of mass murders
Whites are 60% of the US population
I would say this rate is pretty much proportional to population. Statistical noise.
I am not going to get into the high rate of “non-mass-murder” murders committed by black males, because there are about a million confounding factors and it is not useful to frame the problem in those terms.
Identity politics is a continuous inane argument of incorrect conclusions drawn from fallacious assumptions. Just about every statement in this incoherent rant is either an outright lie or a conclusion based on a lie.
Colin Ferguson
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