Paranoid Parents and the Fear of Walking to School

I was reading a CDC report today which, while it is a few years old, indicates a clear trend in this country: the rising paranoid delusions of parents concerning the risks to their children. The CDC report was about something that wasn't a controversy when I was young—walking to school.

But that was before parents were spoon-fed fear-mongering media pieces that emphasized the exceptional while ignoring the ordinary. The CDC, in 2001 reported that: "Thirty years ago, the sight of children walking or biking to school was common. In fact, nearly 90% of children who lived within a mile of school used active transportion (i.e., walking or bicycling) as their primary mode of travel. In recent years, the rate of active transport has declined dramatically." By 2005 the CDC reported, "Today, fewer than 15% of children and adolescents use active modes of transportation.

The CDC tried to look at the excuses given by parents as to why they won't allow them their children to walk. The CDC though that a decrease in the number of schools, by about 1,000 nationally, might explain some of it. But, the change in school amounted to a decline of just a couple of percentage points. And the CDC found that "active transport to school has also significantly declined among children who still live than 1 or 2 miles from school." Even, when you compare only those living near the school, walking to school steeply dropped.

Parents used weather as an excuse. But the CDC looked at weather patterns in four large cities in each of the four main regions of the country and found "some slight variations in weather patterns over the past 30 years. However, there is no distinct pattern to these changes over time. Therefore, it does not seem likely that changes in weather account for the decline in active transport."

Next, they looked at crime, especially the fear of child abduction. They note that "rate of youth abduction is low in school areas." Only 4% of abductions take place near schools. Of course, most child abductions are custody disputes, one parent taking the child from the other parent. The abduction that everyone fears, the so-called "stranger danger" kind amounts to about 100 cases nationally per year, in comparison to 204,000 family abductions. There is another category which is called "nonfamily abduction" which is not considered the stereotypical "stranger danger" situation. But the Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that "Nonfamily abduction victims overall were particularly concentrated among the oldest groups, with 59 percent being 15-17 years old." They also note that the "stranger danger" prevention misses the fact that "the majority of non-family abductions (53 percent) are abducted by persons known to the child: 38 percent of nonfamily abducted children were abducted by a friend or long-term acquaintance, 5 percent by a neighbor,  6 percent by persons of authority, and 4 percent by a caretaker or babysitter." While the stereotypical kidnappings are the most dangerous they happen in extremely small numbers. CNN reported that the number of stereotypical kidnappings "are small and getting smaller."

However, if you want to terrify parents speak in the broadest term possible: talk about 800,000 missing children per year. That will do it. Many of those are just kids who stayed at the mall too late, a large number are kids that another family took, usually in a custody dispute, some are children that parents literally threw out of their home. Conflate all these categories and you scare the bejesus out of someone.  Who wants to do that? Anyone who has an incentive to over-emphasize risks. That would included media that want higher viewer ratings or want to sell newspapers; it would include child protective agencies that rely on tax funding often fueled by fear; it includes child protection charities that know a good scare increases donations, or it may be companies that sell parents fingerprinting, cell phone tracking devices, microchipping, etc.

One final excuse for not allowing the children to walk to school was fear of traffic. The CDC found that "50% of children hit by cars near schools are hit by cars driven by parents of students." Of course, this ignores the risk of driving itself, yet traffic accidents, where a child is a passenger in the vehicle, is the number one cause of death for age groups 1-4, 5-14, and 15-24. Only infants under the age of 1 are more likely to die due to birth conditions, SIDS, prematurity, etc. Statistically a child is more at risk for each mile he is driven, than he is for each mile he walks.

Go Granny, Go

A gang of thugs descend on this jewelry store and begin trying to smash the windows to steal items on display. Shop staff coming running but retreat when threatened with crowbars and the gang resumes trying to smash the windows. I suggest they aren't too bright as they could have just walked in and taken the stuff, but intelligence and crime rarely go together, at least not this sort of crime.

Watch off to the right of the screen and you will see Super Granny come running across the street. She pounces on the gang and starts swinging her handbag at them. They have helmets on, heavy jackets and are armed with crow bars, yet Super Granny seems to terrify them. As she wades into the gang, swinging her bag left and right, they decide to jump on their motorcycles and flee. But it appears Granny gets the last laugh as one of them is knocked over and other people pounce and hold the thug for the police. Alas, knowing British police they will probably apologize to the thug for the inconvenience.

Super Granny, Ann Timson, says she was standing around talking to someone when she heard a commotion. At first she thought the men were fighting with one another. And she said she was alarmed "that too many people just stood around watching as if they were in shock and nobody was doing anything." Then she realized it was a robbery and got even angrier because "they felt they could get away with what they were doing in broad daylight."

The elderly woman says she smacked one of the men "with my shopping but he got away. I don't know what happened next but I just kept swinging my bag. Then they tried to escape, I landed several blows against one lad on the back of a bike and brought him to the ground. He raised a hammer to me so I just kept hitting out and shouting and shouting for others to help and bring them down."

Because of her intervention others joined in and helped her and four of the thugs were apprehended. She insists she is no hero and just wants "to be left in peace" and doesn't want media attention. I suspect that she won't get her wish there given the uniqueness of what she did. Unfortunately most people allow injustice to continue when they see, afraid to intervene. Super Granny is a marvelous exception and a role model.

One of the men was brought to the ground by Super Granny and apprehended on the spot. A member of the public followed another until the police arrested him. And two others were caught by the police after they received photos of the incident on their BlackBerrys. Two others are still at large. Of course the police, while thanking the public, urged people to not risk "their own safety by getting involved themselves."

A man filming a documentary across the street caught the incident on film.

I should note that the police in Britain are very much opposed to communities policing themselves yet very hesitant to do anything themselves in many cases. I will give a personal example when I was spending a few months in a small town on the English coast, not far from Dover.

I was in line in a local fast food restaurant when one of these lower class thugs that now permeate British society comes in. He pushes his way to the front of the line and starts getting aggressive with this older woman who is standing there. He gets into an altercation with this woman and starts becoming aggressive toward her. I'm standing there astounded by his thuggish behavior. I go to the staff of the restaurant and demand to know whey they are letting this happen. I get the "what-am-I-supposed-to-do excuse" from them and suggest they call the police immediately—I still thought the police would help at that time.

The thug is threatening the woman but the staff stand there watching, as if it were television. The thug pushes his way through the people and goes outside. I see the police there and run out to them. I point the officer to the thug as he is standing around the corner with some of his equally low-class friends having a laugh the way he treated this elderly woman. I tell the officer: "That's him right there. I was inside and saw what he did and can testify about it." The officer just stands there, doing nothing. I ask: "Aren't you going to do something?"

His response astounded me. "Well, I will in a bit, I don't want to embarrass him in front of his friends." At that point I wanted to smack the cop. Given the culture of the friends I suggest that the best thing that could have happened was for them to see that their are consequences to their actions. Alas, in the British welfare state, the consequence of being a criminal is to qualify for welfare programs meant to help you. No wonder the British underclass is growing.

UPDATE: More reports I've seen indicate that Super Granny is in her 70s and that a fifth man has been arrested.

Self-Inflicted Justice

I am not a proponent of the death penalty. I don't have that much confidence in government to get it right. In addition I think there is a tendency to apply it in situations where it is entirely inappropriate. But when justice is self-inflicted, I can't complain, just comment about karma and smile.

One major case of self-inflicted justice was the death of Dan White. You will remember that White assassinated San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. He also wanted to murder one of my favorite leftists, and friend, Carol Ruth Silver. White's deed went relatively unpunished. He claimed diminished capacity from eating too many Twinkies, and literally walked out of prison after a short time. He then had the bad taste to return to San Francisco and eventually killed himself in his garage. That was self-inflicted justice and I couldn't complain.

But, perhaps one of my favorite examples of this, and what would have been a contender for the Darwin Award, took place outside Krugersdorp, a town not far from Johannesburg, in South Africa. There is a Lion and Rhino Game Reserve outside the town, one that I visited on several occasions. I would drive in from the backside, which was easier access from where I was living.

The road to the park was fairly isolated and mostly uninhabited. On the left side of the road was the entrance to the main park, but on the right were a few compounds for animals as well as a water area for hippos and crocs. You could actually walk down the pathways to the area on the right and view things without paying an admission fee since this was technically outside the park and they didn't try to police admission there. Across the road was the small guard house where you would pay admission to the main park.

I would almost always visit both areas, though I did stop once just to go through the free area because I was with an American friend who had a train to catch and there wasn't time to drive into the park.

The relative isolation of the area meant that the criminals, who are running rampant in South Africa, could stage armed robberies there on a regular basis. No one would see it and the single guard at the gate was easily overpowered and he had lots of cash from people paying admission fees. So the place was robbed with amazing regularity. Now, if you knew how violent robbers were in South Africa you would grow to hate them. I experienced such attacks myself and they are brutal. One friend told how his partner's mother, a very elderly woman, found robbers in her home. She was quite weak and frail and couldn't do anything to harm them. They pushed her to the ground and then jumped up and down on her legs to break them so she couldn't move. Charming. So, such people don't get much sympathy from me.

Apparently one day a robber decides to hold up the admission gate at the Lion and Rhino Park, the very gate I mentioned above. He pulls a gun on the guard and demands all the money in the till. As the guard is taking the money out to hand it to the thug, a miracle happens. In an odd, unexpected, and totally unlikely coincidence, a police car drives down this rural, tiny road.

Considering that you are lucky if the South African police bother to show up when they are called, and when they themselves are not the armed robbers, it is such an unlikely coincidence that the robber hadn't even given the matter thought—not that such people are too likely to plan ahead. The robber knows better than running into the park itself, but he can't exactly run down the road either, as the police are in a car and will easily catch him.

So the robber bolts across the road and spots the field on the other side of the fence. He scurries over the tall fence, a skill these thugs practice. They also know the SA police are too lazy to actually pursue them over a fence. I can attest to this, as in one armed attack I called the police who, when they showed up, rang my phone to tell me that they were outside the five foot gate and insisted I had to come outside, where the armed thugs were last seen, to let them in since they refused to climb the gate themselves.

It is true that inside the park there are lions, cheetahs, leopard and rhinos—all very deadly creatures should you get in their way. Our criminal felt very safe on the other side of the road—away from those really nasty animals. Instead, he didn't realize that the fence he climbed over put him in a compound with a very different kind of animal—one not native to Africa at all.

Inside was a magnificent, but very large, Bengal tiger. The robber inadvertently stumbled upon the tiger and the tiger quite happily assumed it had stumbled upon lunch. It set about devouring the man on the spot. Self-inflicted justice. That tiger could have been elected president if he was eligible for office. I swear it is entirely true.

Wild animals were actually loved for their anti-crime activities. Deep inside one of the huge game parks was a small town, I wish I could remember the name of it but it has slipped my mind. The town was entirely surrounded by wilderness and there were no fences separating the town from the animals, just as there are no fences between the lodges you rent in the park and the animals.

When it is light out the dangerous animals would tend to avoid people (hippos and crocs were exceptions). But when it gets dark the animals get a lot braver and will attack humans. Without fences you can bet that when parents told their kids to be home before dark, those kids listened.

Well, the government felt sorry for these people and decided to build a fence around the town to protect them from the wild animals. The town folk were furious. They said that they were safer with the wild animals roaming the streets because it kept the criminals out of town. They refused the fence, preferring the lions on their lawn to the thugs in masks who would break into homes in the dark and slaughter people for a few dollars, or rands as the case may be. Interesting when you consider how people use the "jungle" scenario as a term to describe crime. (For the record, most of Africa is not a jungle, but bush. The jungles you see in Tarzan movies are more Hollywood than Africa.)

Correction: This was written from memory. Since then I was able to locate more information which confirms, and corrects, the basic thrust of my story. There were three robbers that day. Two of them fled on foot. One in a car, and one on foot were arrested. The third man is the one who had jumped the enclosure into the area for the tiger. At first police did not realize he was there. A day after the robbery they were searching the area for a firearm used in the robbery when they were called to the tiger enclosure because the man's body was discovered there. They also found a cellphone and wallet belonging to the guard who was robbed. This apparently took place in 2002.

Photo: Dorothy was right to be worried about lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

More Immigrants, Less Crime?

The xenophobic Right, which loves to verbally bash immigrants, has repeatedly pushed the canard that immigrants cause crime. They claim that there is a crime wave hitting American due to immigrants and repeat claims that crime in border states is particularly bad. What they don't do is show crime statistics. These are the kind of people, so ignorant of evidence, that they think an anecdotal story suffices.

Let us go to ground zero is the immigration debate: Arizona. It is there that Republicans pushed through an infamous anti-immigration bill that has many people shocked and concerned. So what has happened in the Arizona border towns? Not much actually, as the Arizona Republic found when it talked the police chiefs in those towns.

Nogales, Arizona shares the border with Nogales, Mexico but the Arizona town says it doesn't know what the anti-immigration crowd is talking about. Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez says: "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."

The Republic says that they looked at the FBI Uniform Crime Report and statistics provided by local police agencies which "show that the crime rates in Nogales,Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade..." They also found: "Statewide rates of violent crime also are down."

Politicians, mainly, if not exclusively Republican, have made speeches about crime along the Arizona border. But Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, from Pima County, says: "This is a media-created event. I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure." In Cochise County the "crime rate has been 'flat for at least 10 years, the sheriff added."

The Republic reports: "While the nation's illegal-immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2004, according to federal records, the violent-crime rate declined 35 percent." If illegal immigrantion causes crime then shouldn't crime rates rise with more immigration,not fall? In Arizona the violent-crime rate "dropped from 512 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 447 incidents in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available."

This decrease in crime in "crime-ridden" Arizona—if you believe the hype about immigrants—continues to show up in the most recent statistics as well. The Wall Street Journal reports, "Arizona's major cities all registered declines" in crime and:

In Phoenix, police spokesman Trent Crump said, "Despite all the hype, in every single reportable crime category, we're significantly down." Mr. Crump said Phoenix's most recent data for 2010 indicated still lower crime. For the first quarter of 2010, violent crime was down 17% overall in the city, while homicides were down 38% and robberies 27%, compared with the same period in 2009.

Sure there is crime related to drug smuggling and it is growing in many ways. But that is not illegal immigrants by any means. Your typical undocumented worker can't afford cocaine to smuggle, they are lucky to afford the cost of getting themselves across the border. The violence we see is drug war related and as long as drug profits are high, which is a result of the war on drugs, then smuggling will be associated with violence. And the more violent our drug warriors become the more violent the smugglers will be. But this is not related to immigration: legal or illegal.

Sociologist Robert Sampson looked at crime trends in the US and compared them to immigration patterns. More immigrants didn't lead to more crime, which is what should have happened had there been a direc link between the two. If you look at the chart here you will see the time line shows American crime trands from 1990 to 2004 (this is from a 2006 article). You see crime rates dropping as immigration rates increased. Around 1998 crime rates stagnated for the most part, but immigration fell. So as immigration rates were increased crime fell, and when immigration fell crime rates stopped falling.

Sampson wrote:

Yet our study found that immigrants appear in general to be less violent than people born in America, particularly when they live in neighborhoods with high numbers of other immigrants. We are thus witnessing a different pattern from early 20th-century America, when growth in immigration from Europe was linked with increasing crime and formed a building block for what became known as "social disorganization" theory.

In today's world, then, it is no longer tenable to assume that immigration automatically leads to chaos and crime. New York is a magnet for immigration, yet it has for a decade ranked as one of America's safest cities. Border cities like El Paso and San Diego have made similar gains against crime. Perhaps the lesson is that if we want to continue to crack down on crime, closing the nation's doors is not the answer.

Professor Tim Wadsworth, from the University of Colorado read what Sampson wrote and decided to test it. The University press release reports what Wadsworth found:

Drawing from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports and U.S. Census data, Wadsworth analyzed 459 cities with populations of at least 50,000. Wadsworth measured immigrant populations in two ways: those who are foreign-born and those who immigrated within the previous five years.

Wadsworth focused on medium and large cities because about 80 percent of violent crime takes place there. Wadsworth said distinguishing legal and illegal immigration is difficult, as the U.S. Census does not track those numbers, but he notes that immigrant citizens and non-citizens often live together in the same communities.

He tracked crime statistics for homicide and robbery because they tend to be reported more consistently than other crimes. Robberies are usually committed by strangers -- which increases the reporting rate -- and "homicides are difficult to hide," he said.

Wadsworth looked to see if crime rose as immigration rose and fell as immigration declined. Instead he found the opposite: "cities that experienced the largest growth in the population of foreign-born and newly arrived immigrant populations experienced the largest decreases in violent crime between 1990 and 2000." Wadsworth's conclusions corresponded with those of Sampson, and instead of showing a rise in crime because of immigration, the records showed that crime dropped.

How the most religious states fare.

The Pew Survey has released information on the most religious states in the United States and the least religious. They look at four factors to rate the depth of religious belief. The four questions rate the importance of religion, worship attendance, frequency of prayer and certainty in the existence of a god. I’m not convinced that the middle issues are as important as the other two. Using the two more important factors the top ten most religious states would be: Mississippi; Alabama; Arkansas; South Carolina; Tennessee; Louisiana; Georgia; Kentucky; North Carolina; and Oklahoma. Using all four survey questions wouldn't appear to change the ranking significantly.

The ten least religious states would be: New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, Alaska, California, Nevada and Colorado.

With this in mind we can test a claim made by religious folk the when people are more religious society is more moral, stable, peaceful and prosperous. These are objective claims that can be investigated. So I did.
Blessings from God?

First, let’s investigate the claim that religious people receive material blessings from their deity because they are religious. This claim is quite prevalent. I heard it from the pulpit frequently, especially by the top leaders of the Religious Right. You will often hear it said that America is prosperous because has been a “Christian nation.” And the Bible clearly indicates that long-life is one blessing from Jehovah to his followers. If this is true we would expect those states with higher levels of religious fervor to more prosperous than those with lower levels of religious belief.

I looked at two different statistics that would indicate some sort of benevolent blessing to the believing states as opposed to the more secular states. First, I thought the poverty rate would be a good place to start. If the Christian deity increases prosperity due to one’s faith then the more religious states ought to have lower poverty rates and the more secular states ought to have higher poverty rates. Unfortunately it seems the deity got it backwards: the percentage of people living below the poverty line in the ten most religious states averaged out to 16.67%. In the more secular states the percentage below the poverty line was 10.3%—at least according to the Census Bureau.

So would the deity do better with life expectancy. Many Christians make the claim that believing and surrendering to God will increase life expectancy. Once again, if this is true then the most religious states ought to have an longer average life expectancy than do the least religious states. Again it seems the deity got things backwards. The average life expectancy in the ten most religious states was 74.9 but in the least religious states it was 77.8. Of course I don’t think religion has anything to do with life expectancy, but if it did, then it would appear that religion lowers life expectancy instead of increasing it.

Personal Morality

One of the most persistent claims I hear from Christians is that without the belief in some sort of deity it is not possible to be live a moral life. They are quite blunt that a belief in God is necessary otherwise people will live immorally and violently. First, lets look at some firm numbers that will indicate if this is true.

Christians are very adamant about sexual morality. It is an absolute sin to have sex outside marriage—this is a widespread belief most likely believed by the dominant conservative sects. The smaller “liberal” denominations are a bit more flexible. So does religion increase, or decrease, the likelihood of having sex outside marriage? First I looked at the data for the number of teenage births as a percentage of all births in the state. If belief in a god acts as some divine chastity belt then the teen pregnancy rates ought to be lower in the ten most religious states. In those religious states teen pregnancies made up 16.7% of all pregnancies. In the less religious states it was 10.3%. A different way of measure teen pregnancy rates can be found here, but it comes to similar results.

I also looked at the percentage of all pregnancies for unwed women. This is one of the key moral messages that the conservative Christians preach. So how’s it working out for them on that front? In the religious states 39% of all pregnancies were to single women. In the least religious states it was 33.8%.

Christians preach the “sanctity of marriage” very loudly. They say marriage is so sacred that gay people can’t have it because they would “degrade” it. I was a bit worried that the least religious states might lose out on this one because the Pew Survey listed Nevada as one of the least religious states. Nevada is a divorce mecca because it has the easiest divorce laws in the United States. So people go to Nevada for the express purpose of getting a divorce. That means Nevada has the highest divorce rate in the country, as you would expect giving the circumstances. What I found was the divorce rate per 1,000 people, in the most religious states, was 3.95 and in the least religious states it was 3.91. If I exclude Nevada’s high divorce rate the less religious states have an average of 3.62 per 1,000. So, even with Nevada included the less religious states have lower levels of divorce. Excluding Nevada the difference is even more pronounced.

Please remember I’m not particularly opposed to divorce nor am I opposed to sex before marriage. I’m even in favor of sex after marriage. I am just using criteria that Christians emphasize and showing that their belief system doesn’t even seem to support the results they say they want.

Morality Toward Others

To me the real test of morality isn’t whether you get pregnant, or have sex outside marriage, or even get a divorce. The real test of morality is how you treat others. Many believers tell me that without a god then there is no objective morality about things like rape and murder. So I looked specifically at the issues of violent offenses against other people. If religion makes people moral than the more religious states ought to have less violent crime while the less religious states ought to have more violent crime.

First, I looked at violent crime in general. The Census Bureau keeps such statistics on the basis of the numbers of such crimes per 100,000 people. In the religious states there are an average of 520.7 violent crimes per 100,000. In the less religious states the number is significantly lower: 370.3. What about forcible rape? That really ought to be a double taboo since it includes violence and sex outside marriage (usually). In the ten most religious states the average number of rapes, per 1,000 population was 30.3; in the less religious states it was 24.5. So, far this wasn’t looking good for the religious states.

I then decided to check out murder rates. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard believers argue that murder is only wrong because God says it is, and since unbelievers don’t believe in a god then they have no moral restraint on killing others. I was doubtful of that myself. So I checked the murder rate per 100,000 population. In the ten most religious states the rate was 7 murders per 100,000 people. In the less religious states it was 2.49. That’s almost a 3 to 1 ratio.

Conclusions

I looked at two main areas. The first is whether believers are somehow blessed by their deity for believing. That they have higher poverty rates and shorter life expectancy in states that are more religious than in those that are less religious seems to contradict that idea.

The second area regards the larger realm of personal morality. That two has two areas. The first of them was how people in religious states act according to the moral teachings of their own religion. We see that that what most conservative Christians would describe as “sexual sin” is more prevalent in religious states than in the less religious states. And divorce, which strikes at the very heart of the “sanctity of marriage” believe is higher in the religious states and lower in the more secular state. It would seem that the people in the least religious states are more likely to live up to “Christian morality” than the people in the more Christian states.

The second area of morality was how people act toward others. For that we looked at violent crime in general, violent rape and murder. There is little question about the immorality of these actions and widespread consensus that such acts are wrong and should be outlawed. What we saw was that stronger religious beliefs did not lower the rate for these crimes at all. The states with highest “faith” rating had more violence, rape and murder than the state with the lowest rating.

There are other ways to checking how these states compare. We could use VD rates as a proxy for morality indicators. I believe if we do the more religious states would lose out again. We can look at polls on things like torture—but polls done on that topic showed support for torture higher among religious people than non-religious people. We could look at the well-being of children in the two groups. A quick look at the “Kids Count” index of the Anne E. Casey Foundation shows that the religious states doing less well than the less religious states. Alabama ranks 48th; Arkansas 47th, Georgia 42nd, Kentucky 41st, Louisiana 49th, Mississippi 50th, North Carolina 37th, Oklahoma 44th, South Carolina 45th, and Tennessee 46th. In comparison the less religious states did as follows: Alaska 35th, California 20th, Colorado 22nd, Connecticut 4th, Maine 12th, Masschusetts 5th, Nevada 39th, New Hampshire 1st, Rhode Island 15th, and Vermont 8th. (I can’t say whether I agree with these ratings, they are used just as an example. Child abuse rates could be used as well.)

If you think there are other valid data sets to use suggest them in the comment section. I’d be curious to see how these two sets of states compare to one another across a wide range of measurements. I picked ones I thought were obvious and uncontroversial and didn’t know precisely what current statistics would show when applied to the states in the Pew Survey. I did not pick the states, I use the Pew data. Pew doesn’t rate the kind of religious beliefs well here though other surveys they have done do indicate the kind of Christianity that predominates. So, you will find that many of the professed Christians in the less religious states actually tend to be “liberals” in theology while the Christians in the more religious states tend to be more fundamentalist. That would indicate a wide divergence of religious intensity than is showing here. The divergence is because these numbers make the less religious states appear more religious than they are while underestimating the fervency of the believers in the more religious states.
Notes on methodology: In all cases I used percentages or rates per 100,000 (or per 1,000) population. This standardizes the rating so that the numbers take into account the varying population sizes. All the numbers used are unaffected by population differences. I took the statistics for all 10 of the most religious states and averaged them to one number. I then did the same for the 10 least religious states. This averaging out allows to compare the differences between the two groups as a whole. To duplicate my spreadsheet go to the sources listed and take down the data for the 20 states being studied. (I did this by one set of data for the most religious states and another for the least religious states.) Total up the numbers and average them out. Unless there is a typo in my spreadsheet, and I tried to check it carefully, then you should get the same results.

Better the meek inherit a handgun.

One of the virtues of guns is that they are the great equalizer. In situations of disparate power where one individual can dominate, control or hurt a weaker individual the presence of a handgun, in the hands of the victim, can end the domination by equalizing things or by giving the victim the upper-hand. This is a virtue to the downtrodden of the world whether or not one is comfortable with the existence of firearms.

This news story illustrates the point. In Visalia, California Joe Martinez was violent man. He had two felony convictions of for assault. One of his neighbors said that the man was abusive toward his family. In addition to these acts he was convicted of threatening witnesses and for owning a firearm though he was a convicted felon.

The news story is itself poorly written but I assume from it that his common-law wife was trying to leave the home permanently -- and who can blame her? Neighbors described what happened. They say that Martinez tried to stop the move “drew a gun and threatened to shoot everyone, including kids.”

One of the kids he threatened to kill was a 13-year-old boy. The boy emerged out of the house with a gun and shot Martinez stopping the assault in it’s tracks. Police say it was “a clear case of self-defense” and won’t be pressing charges.

From the sound of it this boy would have had no chance against a armed, bigger, violent man. He could try the “passive” response that some people suggest. The kids in the Amish school house did that and virtually all of them died because of it. Or this boy could equalized the situation, or in this case turn it in his favor, by using a handgun. There is an old saying: God made men, Sam Colt made them equal.

Some may lament that this boy will face a lifetime of knowing he killed someone -- and it sounds like he killed his father but the news report is unclear. No doubt he will experience some emotional trauma. I’m doubt that sparing him trauma by having him dead is a better alternative.

Marvin Horton was intent on invading someone's home. He first climbed a six foot chain-link fence to enter the yard. He fought off three dogs and then forced open the front door of Brenda’ Glover’s home. Her two sons, 17-years-old and 18-years-old were fighting the invader when Brenda entered the room. She and her sons tried to evict the man but couldn’t. She threatened to get her handgun if he didn’t stop. He refused.

She got her handgun and shot the man in the butt. That didn’t even stop him. The woman fired two more times. At this point the man fled the scene but amazingly ran across the street, climbed another fence and kicked in the door of that house. The homeowners there fought him off. He then invade a third home which is when police finally showed up and apprehended him. Glover said she got the gun when her sons were little as a means of self-defense but never thought she’d have to use it in her own home.

A six foot fence didn’t stop him. Three dogs and a locked door didn’t stop him. Two hulking teenage males, weighing in at 385 pounds between them, didn’t stop him. But one woman with a handgun forced him out of the house.

Terri Gavinski was recently home alone. Her husband was at work. She was suddenly confronted by a large man who had broken into to her home. She pleaded with him not to hurt her and said she’d give him anything he wanted. He forced her upstairs and started ransacking the house. While he was searching for valuables she spotted a loaded handgun belonging to her husband and put it in the pocket of her housecoat. He forced her to help him carry valuables downstairs but didn’t notice she now was armed. In the kitchen she pulled the gun and fired and the invade fled in terror. Terri said: “I am not a gun person. My husband is.” I bet she’s glad about that now.

Recently in Brighton, Tennessee a man broke into the home of two women at 3 am and began assaulting them. He tied them up and was trying to rape them. One woman managed to get loose and fled to the home of a neighbor who armed himself and went to the home to help the second woman. When he entered found the intruder attacking the second woman. The intruder attacked the man who shot him. When police arrived they found the rapist on the front porch dead.

Eighty-year-old James Pickett heard someone knocking at his door. As he opened the door to see who was there two armed men pushed into his house and started attacking him. What they didn’t know was that Pickett had a pistol in his pocket and wasn’t happy to see them. He pulled his gun and shot one of the intruders. The two fled and eventually called an ambulance because the bullet had done some real damage. Without that handgun what chance would that 80-year-old man have against two armed attackers?

All these stories are recent cases that took place over the last couple of weeks. They are cases where a violent individual with evil intentions thought he had the upper hand because his victims were unarmed, too old, weaker than himself, etc. In each case a handgun brought equality to the situation and the aggressor came out the worse because of it.

Of course I wished we lived in a world where the elderly, or children, or women home alone didn’t have to fear for their lives. We don’t live in utopia however. Nor are we likely to. Even if we managed to take firearms away there will always be power disparity between groups and individuals, between the young and strong and the elderly and feeble, between men and women, or men and children. No amount of “gun control” will ever change that. All such measures will manage is to disarm the weaker victims and guarantee the attackers a safety zone to conduct in which to commit their crimes.

Handgun claim by DC officials highly dubious.

The Los Angeles Times has a story about the case headed for the Supreme Court dealing with the draconian handgun laws in Washington, D.C. The District has some of the strictest antigun laws in the nation and, in a related matter, some of the worst crime in the country.

The Times reports “District of Columbia officials say their ban on easily concealed handguns dates back to 1858. And they argue handguns are involved in most violent crime...”

Interesting. Obviously that 1858 ban is what was responsible for saving the life of President Lincoln. Without it he might have been assassinated. Or perhaps I misremember.

I do wonder, however, if reporters feel any compulsion to check facts or not? It appears to me that as long as some official states something is true the reporter feels his job is done provided he attributes the claim to source, regardless of the accuracy. In this story the issue is the claim that handguns are involved in “most violent crime.”

According to the Department of Justice’s Crime Victimization Survey there were 4,718,330 violent crimes in the United States. The weapon of choice is over 67% of them was no weapon at all. In two-thirds of violent crimes no weapon is involved. So what percentage of violent crimes do involved a handgun, the weapon in question in the D.C. ban? A surprisingly low 7.8%.

Not only are handguns NOT used in the majority of all violent crimes they are not used in the majority of cases in any single type of violent crime. Based on the crime victimization survey here are some interesting facts. (Homicide is categorized differently.)

In rape cases only about 2% involve a handgun and 3% involve any gun. In other words an armed woman has about a 33 to 1 chance of being better armed than her assailant. Even in an aggravated assault an armed victim has a 3 to 1 chance of being better armed than his attacker.

The one exception to this trend is homicide. Here about half of the crimes involve handguns. And approximately 17% involved another type of firearm. But approximately one third of all homicides involve weapons other than a firearm. So how would adding these homicides to the total number of violent crimes change the statistics? Hardly at all. There were 16,692 murders in 2005 (the latest data available). Add those in with all other violent crimes and the total number of violent crimes in the United States increase to 4,735,022. There were approximately 53,000 other violent crimes commited with a firearm of some type (not just handguns). Adding in homicides committed with all firearms brings that number to 69,700. That means that under 15% of all violent crimes, including homicide, involve a firearm of some type -- less if you look at handguns alone.

If you are armed and victimized in a violent attack of all kinds, the chances are about 7 to 1 that you will be better armed than your assailant.

The most charitable interpretation I can give to this report is that D.C. officials meant that most violent crimes in the District are conducted with a handgun -- although I have heavy doubts about that as well. But if we grant them this possible reprieve their case for banning handguns is even weaker. In most the country handguns are not banned and guns are used against victims in less than 10% of all cases of violent crimes. This "reprieve" would mean that in D.C., where handguns are banned, the number of guns used against innocent people is more than five times as prevalent. That would imply the handgun ban may have actually increased the prevalence of armed attacks which is precisely the opposite of the case they are wishing to make. Either way the claims of the D.C. officials are in trouble.

Note: the chart showing the number of violent crimes associated with handguns is taken directly from the Department of Justice.

Hate and compassion: violence and cooperation

Terry Mangum, 26, spent hours studying the Bible. He says: “I love God.” He says he was “called by God to be a prophet.” And in the hours he spent reading the Bible he knew what it said: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

Kenneth Cummings, Jr., worked for Southwest Airlines since he was 22 years old. In the two dozen years that he worked for the airline he saved his money and set up college funds for his niece and nephew. On June 4 he went to a gay club in Houston, E.J.’s. It was there he met Terry Mangum.

Cummings thought Mangum was there for the same reason he was, to meet another gay man. Mangum, however, was on a mission from God, or so he said. Mangum wanted to carry out God’s word and that meant sinners like Cummings had to be executed for “sexual perversion” just as the Bible says. Mangum said it was his plan to kill a gay man and Cummings “just happened to be the one that I bumped into.”

As Mangum said: “I planned on sending him to hell.” When Cummings invited Mangum to go home with him the “prophet” was happy to do so. It would be there that he could safely carry out his mission. He stabbed Cummings to death.

After the brutal murder he stuffed Cummings body in the trunk of a car and drove out to a ranch owned by his elderly grandfather. Along the way he stopped and used the dead man’s credit card to buy lighter fluid, a flashlight and hydrogen peroxide.

Mangum poured lighter fluid on the body and set it alight and then buried it in a shallow grave. Mangum says that he believes “in his heart” that what he did that day was right.

A private, non profit, volunteer organization, Texas EquuSearch, got involved in the case. EquuSearch founder Tim Miller was told that Cummings credit cards had been used. He then found out that Mangum’s grandfather had a ranch a few miles away. Without any power to search property involuntarily Miller had to ask permission. He explained to Robert Mangum what he believed had happened. The 90-year-old man said to Miller: “If what you tell me is true, I’ll never have another birthday.” He granted permission for the search and later identified his grandson for the police.

Miller said: “I just knew we were going to find his body out there.” With 50 acres Miller organized a volunteer team of 600 people. Among the volunteers were many flight attendants. One was Jill Van der Werff who explained: “Because he was a flight attendant with Southwest Airlines for several years, he knows so many people across so many boundaries. The people that flew with him loved him.” Another flight attendant who participated in the search, Scott Wells, said: “He was a very giving person. As soon as you met him, he felt like one of those people you’ve known for a long time.”

EquuSearch was founded by Tim Miller after his daughter was abducted and murdered. Funded entirely by corporate sponsors and individual donors EquuSearch. Membership is open to any one over the age of 18 who is not a convicted felon. Miller’s experience with the police forced him to take action.

When Laura Miller disappeared her father went to the police. He was especially concerned since, only a few months earlier, the remains of a young woman had been found not far away. Miller wrote:

I told the police officer taking the report of my concerns, and would they please check the area where she had been found, or tell me where it was located so that I might check myself. Of course they said Laura was sixteen, she ran away and will be coming back home.

Miller told the police that his daughter had problems with seizures and required medication. She knew this and wouldn’t run away without her medicine, which was still at home. Police told him that girls her age are smart and can find what they want on the streets. Miller found that explanation bizarre.

Three days later Miller discovered that the young girl who had been found had lived only four blocks away. “So I went back to the police station to tell them my new worries about the close location of our houses...” He was told to go home and wait; that eventually his daughter would call home and he will see that he was worrying about nothing. He asked the police to reveal the location where the other girl had been found so he could do his own search. The police refused to tell him.

Miller did wait. For almost two years he continued to pester the police, asking them to do their job. He was dismissed every time. Miller was depressed and became suicidal. He sought hospitalization because of the seriousness of the situation. It was there that he finally learned the truth.

Some kids on dirt bikes smelled something in the field one day while Miller was in the hospital. When they went to see what it was they discovered a body of a young woman. It was not Laura, but when police finally investigated, they found Laura’s body not far away. So in two years, three young girls were killed and their bodies dumped in the same location. There was a serial killer in the area and the inactivity of the police allowed him to continue.

Even then Miller couldn’t find closure. Police kept his daughter’s remains for three years. They refused to tell him where the body had been found. He and his wife walked the fields until they found the markers for a crime scene. Finally, when the remains were released for burial, the family discovered they had only been given 28 bones. The other bones had been given to a research facility without permission from the family. Miller sued and won a $16 million settlement. That got the attention of the police. They appealed and Miller told them he would drop the case if they simply returned the remains of his daughter for burial.

He then learned that his daughter had been at a pay phone when she disappeared. To make matters worse the first missing girl had disappeared from the same pay phone. Miller realized that had the police taken his first complaint seriously they might have noticed the connection.

The trauma of the experience wrecked Miller’s family. In addition to the suicidal depression, he took to drinking. His wife left him. He sought out help and began volunteering in other cases of missing people. It was then that he got involved in the search for Laura Smither.

Laura’s father, Bob Smither, is a Libertarian Party activist and believes in the power of private co-operation to solve problems. He and his wife, Gay, founded the Laura Recovery Center to assist in the search for missing persons. The Center is also an entirely private organization that takes no tax funding.

One day Miller was working with Smither at the Center when they started talking. Smither suggested to Miller that since he was an avid horseman, he might be able to organize a volunteer horseback search team. Miller agreed and word was spread. Soon Miller had 45 people regularly attending monthly meetings.

But some volunteers didn’t have horses. But they had boats, planes, and even helicopters. Others had all-terrain vehicles with night vision and infrared equipment. Some were certified rescue divers.

Out of his own frustration with the police, and from Bob Smither’s libertarian vision for solving problems, Texas EquuSearch was born. It now has 2,500 members and has helped people, not just in Texas, but around the world. Miller says that their goal is that “no family has to experience the feeling of hopelessness and loneliness if a loved one should ever disappear.” It is a mission they take seriously and one they perform long after the police have moved on to other matters.

England's streets too dangerous for cops.

The BBC has an interesting report which questions how dangerous the streets of England have become for police officers. The report says:

Research carried out by the Police Federation for England and Wales last year found 40,000 officers had been faced with a knife and 7,000 threatened with a gun during the past two years. Paul Tonks, chairman of the West Midlands Police Federation, said that during his 28 years' service there had always been colleagues injured, but the job had become more dangerous recently. Police constable Norman Brennan says: “Britain is very violent and the increasing violence against police mirrors that faced by other people in society.”

This rise in violent crime in the UK has caused an increase in the debate over arming police with many police saying the streets are too dangerous and they are unarmed while criminals are not. What needs to be remembered is that firearms are nearly completely illegal in the UK. But as we’ve reported here before since hard core gun control went into effect crime has escalated dramatically and the number of weapons in the hands of criminals went up, not down.

Now we have police officers lobbying for the right to be armed because of this sort of criminal violence. But as Pc Brennan stated what is happening to the police “mirrors that faced by other people in society.” So the question the advocates of arming the British police have to ask themselves is whether or not the other innocent people in the UK shouldn’t be able to protect themselves as well.

Drugs & socialism: the more you succeed the more you fail.

The U.S. Coast Guard, which today is another policing body, claims that they “captured” a ship in international waters and boarded it to find it was “filled” with cocaine. It allegedly contained 21 tones of the white powder and was the “largest bust on the water, ever, in history.”

Drug warriors are cheering it as a great victory for the moral and the pure. I would like to argue that it is not a victory by any means and explain why shortly. But first I want to say two things.

If the ship was in international waters then under what authority did the Coast Guard board it and seize it? Now I realize that the neo-cons thinks that “national defense” includes every nation in the world. But I didn’t know the Coast Guard had authority outside of U.S. waters. No matter what was on that ship I have to question the legal authority of U.S. policing forces to seize ships on the high seas. That used to be called piracy.

Second, of course it’s the “largest” “ever”, blah, blah, blah. Drug warriors have been having the largest seizures quite regularly since “I am not a crook” Nixon started the Drug War. There is a penchant among the Drug Warriors to exaggerate a tad bit. Actually they lie, a lot, frequently, and in rather heaping proportions. It’s good for their budget. The press reports it. No body really double checks and they use it to demand more powers, more funding, more personnel and big government gets bigger. Actually the days of big government are gone. We now have gigantic government.

I also think we need to ask if this “success” is actually a success or not. The Drug War is a lot like socialism. The more “successful” it is the harder it fails. Let us assume the sea pirates were telling the truth and they confiscated 21 tons of cocaine. What actually did they accomplish?

Well, obviously the removed cocaine from the supply chain. How did that effect the demand? It didn’t. Demand for cocaine remains unchanged but the supply has been reduced. Now go to Econ 101 for a minute and ask yourself what a reduced supply, with a steady demand, does?

It increases the price! Of what? Of cocaine. So removing 21 tons of cocaine from the market pushes up the price of the cocaine that wasn’t removed from the market. One drug cartel, who ever shipped the drug, took a bit of a loss here. But that is only one. Meanwhile all the competitors to that cartel are reaping windfall profits.

The Coast Guard pushed up the price of cocaine and managed to hurt one cartel while rewarding all the others. Everyone else sees prices, and profits, increase. That is the result of a Drug War success.

Now go to day two of Econ 101. If you increase profits in an industry what happens to suppliers in that industry? The number of suppliers increases. Higher profits only attract additional dealers at all levels of the supply chain. That is the result of a Drug War success.

Second, let us look at how this impacts on crime. There are X number of cocaine users out there, some of them are true addicts. They need to find a way to cover the higher costs of their supply. We do know that some addicts engage in criminal activities to pay for their usage. Let us assume that our local addict, for the sake of illustration, mugs grandmothers after they cash their social security check.

Every week he has to locate two grandmothers to mug to pay for his habit. The Coast Guard, or some other Drug Warrior, has a major bust. One so successful that they cut the supply of drugs dramatically and drug prices double. Our local addict now has to mug four grandmothers instead. That is a the result of a Drug War success.

Of course with higher profit at stake the drug gangs in the country will fight extra hard to secure turf for their dealers. It is more lucrative to do so. Drive by shootings increase, there is increased gang warfare. More people die, some just bystanders. That is the result of a Drug War success.

The sad reality is that the Drug War dramatically increases crime in numerous ways.

All markets, even markets for substances deemed immoral or criminal, have feedback loops. Every action creates a series of actions leading to specific consequences. And these happens whether or not you want them to happen. The reality of seizing illegal drugs is that it raises the price of drugs, rewards dealers who didn’t get caught, hands windfall profits to the other cartels and increases crime on the street. With success like that how can we stand it?

Socialism is similar. Each socialist intervention into the market creates unintended consequences. It sets in motion a chain of events leading to specific results. Push up the cost of labor through well-intentioned measures and you decreased the demand for labor. The net result is that you make some workers a little better off and other workers a lot worse off.

Increase welfare payments and you find the number of people “needing” welfare increases. Pay for that increase by increasing taxes and you find production decreases relative to what it would have been. Everywhere you go you find that these intricate feedback loops seem to confound your best laid central plains. And the more successful you are in imposing these solutions the sooner the inevitable collapse.

The War on Drugs and socialism both, for the most part, are supported by people with good intentions. Too bad intentions have no impact on those feedback loops. In the end both end up doing a great deal of harm.

We can all pretend that they make us safer.

Politicians in San Deigo want to make the city safer. And who is against that? My tendency is to suggest that if they want the public to be safer the first thing any decent politician (an oxymoron I know) ought to do is resign. But the city council of San Diego isn’t about to take my advice.

They have another way of making the city safer. They intend to make it illegal for ice cream truck vendors to sell toy guys to children. The local TV stations says: “Authorities said the number of children who carry toy weapons is growing at an alarming rate, putting the public and officers at risk.”

OK. I am waiting for Safety Officer Wesley Mouch to announce that: “It is our intention to ban pretend guns and pretend ammunition. We believe that this will reduce the number of pretend deaths significantly. In addition our pretend medical services will have far fewer pretend wounds to deal with. It is claimed that cities in Legoland saw a dramatic reduction in pretend crime as well though more bored children did throw real rocks through real windows -- someone should the little buggers where city hall is located.

The local police chief William Lansdowne said may kids “have purchased these [toy] guns from the ice cream vendors, so it gives us the opportunity to really control a problem and prevent crime in the city.” Prevent crime? Are the kids using toy guys to stick up toy banks?

Are they hijacking Hot Wheels cars with these toy guns? Are all cops assholes? (If not they sure do a good job acting like ones.) I can't see this reducing crime though I guess we can pretend it does.

I grew up in the US (I know, I know, don’t say anything -- I pretend I’m Canadian) and virtually every kid in our neighborhood had toy guns. We ran around pretending to shoot each other. It was good practice. It taught us how to deal with idiotic city council members when they showed up.

Now quite honestly there was zero problem. None. No one got hurt. The kids didn’t rush out and buy real guns to kill people. They didn’t stick up banks with them. And back then cops were apparently smart enough not to shoot children with toy guns. Apparently the police today are so brain dead (I suspect they vote Republican) that they can’t tell a toy gun from the real thing. Instead of banning toy guns shouldn’t we ban stupid cops? They kill far more people than kids with a cap gun.

When I say ban them I mean something simple. Test the officers. If they can’t tell the difference between a toy gun and a real gun then disarm the idiots immediately and don’t give them the real thing until they can tell the difference. Send them home to study, without pay.

Let us admit that the real problem is trigger-happy psychopaths in police uniforms running around looking for an excuse to shoot someone -- even a kid with a toy gun. There has been a steady decline in the quality of police officers and typical of bureaucrats instead of fixing that problem they try to find ways to strip the public of freedom instead. On 9/11 government bureaucrats at the airports let people get on planes with box cutters and Americans have been paying the price every since.

It’s really time to stand up to the idiots. The city council of San Diego is our collective winner of Morons of the Week. We’ll send them their prize Monopoly money in an envelope with a pretend stamp. I have one suggestion for these morons: get real!

Photo: A Roy Rogers toy gun not dissimilar to the ones we played with as kids -- before cops got terminal stupidity.

The high cost of gun control.

I have been a victim of violent crime. On one occasion a bullet narrowly missed my head. Yet I have never owned a handgun though I was considering it seriously at one point. The truth is that not someone inclined to purchase a firearm.

Now the horrific shooting in Salt Lake City did cause me to consider that situation. And I can not but conclude that lives were saved because one shopper was armed, in apparent violation of shopping mall policy. But there is another side to the debate as well.

Would a systematic attempt to disarm people prevent violent crime or reduce the rate of violent crime? In fact, does it reduce the rate of violent gun crime?

Recently there were several murders in London as the result of gun violence. And the BBC’s web site ran some information on gun crimes in England and Wales. And the truth is that gun violence has escalated dramatically. Look at this chart that they ran today.



You can see how dramatically gun crime escalated in England in recent years. Yet, I distinctly remember that not that long they imposed what amounted to a total ban on private possession of firearms. I did a check at the London Telegraph and found that one columnist wrote a column in 2003 about what he called “the Government’s ‘total ban’ five years ago”. That would be 1998.

Now I assume the BBC chart accurately reflects gun crimes. And I see the following. There is a major spike from around 1988 to about 1992. Then gun crimes begin to slowly drop only to have another major spike, bigger than the previous one. So some history on recent gun control legislation in the UK.

In 1988 the Conservative government pass new legislation would banned all semiautomatic and pump-action rifles,short shotguns and several other kinds of weapons. Gun crime rose as a result, it didn’t decline. That was a reaction to man going on the rampage and killing several people.

In 1996 another man went on the rampage and did the same thing and in 1997 the government passed new legislation that virtually banned ownership of handguns except for very old, collectors guns. The measure is so extreme that not even the British Olympic shooters can't train inside England. And the government had to pass legislation granting an exception for the 2012 Olympics otherwise the shooting events would have been illegal.

So two major pieces of legislation followed by two major spikes in gun crimes.

Professor Joyce Malcolm is the author of Guns & Violence: the English Experience. On the BBC web site she wrote, “violent crime in America has been plummeting for 10 consecutive years, even as British violence has been rising. By 1996 English rates of violent crime were already far higher than America’s for every major violent crime except murder and rapes” But as the chart we ran in a previous article showed more and more US states have been allowing citizens to carry firearms on their person. So more guns in the general public but “plummeting” crime rates while in England fewer guns increased violent crime.

Malcolm writes that: “The price of British government insistence upon a monopoly of force comes at a high social cost.”

Malcolm notes that cultural factors more than gun ownership effects crime rates and that for most of the last two hundred years guns were equally available in the UK as in the US yet the US still had gun crime rates five times higher than in the UK. But in recent years as weapons have been banned in the UK, but become more prevalent in the US, crime rates in the UK rose while falling in the US.

Certainly the gun control culture has taken over the UK. It is illegal to even own toy guns. And it is basically illegal to defend your own life with a weapon even if the weapon is not a gun. When Eric Butler was being strangled and attacked by two men he used an ornamental sword to defend himself. He was tried and convicted for carrying an offensive weapon. When a toy gun was used to fool two burglars and hold them at bay until the police arrived the police arrested the homeowner for intimidating the burglars. And in another case an elderly man living alone had his home broken into repeatedly. And in his area there were no regular police. During one break in he shot the two men robbing him. He went to prison for life and the government gave one of the attackers legal assistance to help him sue the victim.

Malcolm also makes an important point about British crime figures.

“The murder rates of the U.S. and U.K. are also affected by differences in the way each counts homicides. The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isn't subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police "massage down" the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible.”

Homicides, even with the more expanded definition in the US, have fallen dramatically over the last 15 or so years. Homicides rates are now justly lightly higher than they were in the 1950s, a period that has often been idealized for Americans. If you look at this chart from the Bureau of Justice Statistics you will see that the homicide rate in the 50s was just under 5 for each 100,000 population. It doubled during the late 60s and early 70s and then fluctuated until about 1990 when it declined again leveling out at slightly over 5 per 100,000 population.

The evidence doesn’t seem to support the idea that gun control is the same thing as crime control. There is an old slogan “that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns”. Certainly the criminal class don’t worry about breaking laws so gun control tends to be victim disarmament. And the knowledge that the population is disarmed only gives criminals peace of mind and assurance that their occupational choices are a lot safer than before.

Guns are inanimate objects with no will or life or their own. They do not act. They are acted upon. And their “only” purpose is not to kill but also to protect and prevent killing. Certainly in Salt Lake City the presence of one armed man prevented a killer from taking more lives. And in England restricting firearms has lead to a dramatic rise in violent crime while in the US the greater availability of firearms corresponds with a dramatic decline in crime rates.

And history is filled with incidents which also show firearms to be a virtue and sad tales where the lack of firearms was deadly. I doubt that anyone would literally argue that the people of Warsaw would have benefited if they had fewer guns on August 1, 1944 when they rose up against the Nazi oppressors. They faced an occupying army 15,000 but they were 40,000. But of those 40,000 only 2,500 had guns. This was the same fate one year earlier of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. On April 19, 1943 Nazi troops entered the ghetto to round up the last remaining Jews for deportation to the camps. A relatively small band 750 fighters chased the Nazis out. For one month the people of the ghetto held out. But the ruling regime won and 7,000 Jews were executed on the spot and the rest send to the concentration camps where most died.

Certainly there is a truth, as we have seen, that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. But it is also true that when guns are outlawed only governments will have guns. And governments have been responsible for more murders than all the private criminals put together. Often oppression has won because the state had the monopoly on force.

I am uncomfortable owning a firearm so I don’t. I never have owned one. I would prefer to live in a world where it was unnecessary to do so. But I would also prefer to live in a world where tax shelters were unnecessary but that isn’t likely anytime soon. I am a realist when it comes to firearms. And as much as I wish they were not necessary the evidence is too strong that they are.

Gun free zones and mass shootings.

One thing about the tragedy in Salt Lake City was bothering me. Something didn’t make sense.

We know the basic facts. One individual decided to kill lots of people. He went to a crowded, confined space to do so -- the Trolley Square shopping mall. Within seconds he killed five people. An off duty cop from another city was having dinner with his wife. He hears the gun shots and confronts the killer. The off duty officer is armed. This stops the rampage, and from that point on the only additional death was that of the killer.

What bothered me was why this off duty cop was the only individual to respond. There were a large group of people in a card shop, where the most deaths took place. Why were none of them armed? In fact why were all the other shoppers apparently unarmed? Or was everyone too frightened to confront the killer?

The fright theory doesn’t work well. If you are standing in a crowd and someone is randomly shooting into this crowd even if terrified you shoot back.

Could the gun owners have all fled the scene seeking safety? All the indications are that people were trapped. People in shops couldn’t get out except by running past the gunman. So they hid, they sought cover, they couldn’t flee for the most part.

It is also possible that by some bizarre coincidence people in that general vicinity were all unarmed. Even in the West, where carrying a firearm is legal, it is possible that one could gather a group of a few hundred or thousand people in one spot and have none of them armed. Possible just not likely. We even know that lots of supporters of gun control routinely arm themselves!

So what explained the derth of armed citizens at that moment? Why was there only one person in the entire mall, other than the killer, who was armed?

And the answer came by reading a secondary article in the Salt Lake City Tribune. I always prefer going to a local newspaper as their coverage is usually more detailed. In this article they discuss the debate on gun control -- though in Utah there is not much of a debate. They quote one opponent of victim disarmament as asking: “How many people left their firearms home Monday night because they were afraid of violating a rule?”

Rule? What rule? The paper clarified, “referring to the signs at Trolley Square prohibiting firearms.”

Bingo!

Now mind you I acknowledge a property owner’s right to restrict access to his property contingent upon certain limits on behaviour. A shop owner may prevent smoking in his shop. He may forbid weapons in his shop. When I owned a business I stopped smoking in the shop but never restricted people from carrying a firearm.

This choice ought to belong to the owner of the mall. And apparently they restricted the carrying of firearms. I don’t know if that meant the off-duty officer was in violation of the rule but off hand it sounds as if he was. Good thing too! And I suspect the mall won’t be having a go at him for being armed.

From the description of events it is unlikely anything could have been done fast enough to save the lives of the people outside the mall who were killed first. But I can see that, had shoppers been allowed to carry guns, this would have ended sooner than it did. Certainly the people trapped in the card store, who were picked off and shot, would have fired back and there is a good chance the horror would have ended then.

Had that have happened a couple of lives would have been saved. Tthe incident would have ended before the one armed shopper had time to arrive.

The mall was basically a private “gun free” zone. Of course the problem is that individuals who want to kill people usually don’t worry about violating rules like that. And this raises a question. Was this mall targeted by this young man because it had signs up saying guns were restricted?

If you want to kill a large number of people you really don’t want them shooting back at you. Even if you are intent on dying their action can prevent you from accomplishing your goal. If mass killing is your goal you want your victims to be unarmed. And if you want unarmed victims then you are attracted to a “gun free zone” of one kind or another.

So to accomplish your goal you are looking for several things. One is to find a crowded location. You can’t kill lots of people if there aren’t lots of people. You need a confined space. Otherwise your targets can escape too easily. And you want people who are unarmed.

Not a lot of places fit that bill. Certainly shopping malls, if they restrict firearms, fit that bill. Schools would qualify as well.

It seems that most the “mass shootings” we have witnessed in the United States take place within gun free zones. I know people say guns are the problem. But oddly these mass shootings don’t occur at gun shows. And there is a reason for that. Consider the man in New Zealand who decided to rob a gun store with a machete. That didn’t work out very well for him.

And whatever perverse motives these sick killers have it doesn’t work out very well for their plans if they attack people who are armed. They prefer unarmed victims and a sign proclaiming a specific location as one where guns are not allowed is like a magnet to such lunatics.

The signs forbidding firearms may have disarmed the shoppers for the most part. But it had no impact on the killer nor would it. Breaking a rule like that is the least of his concerns. But it did mean that the shoppers were a prime target and that may explain why the Trolley Square Mall was targeted in the first place.

Note: For information on the Virginia Tech shootings go here.

Worse tragedy averted because shopper was armed.

It is a tragedy when someone, for reasons that never really make sense, goes on the rampage and starts killing for no apparent reason. And we can only be glad that someone is able to stop them before more lives are taken and more families are plunged into mourning.

By now the story of the attack Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City is widespread. An 18-year-old man, armed to the teeth, walked into the mall and just started randomly killing people. Witnesses spoke of the eery “calm” look on his face as he took the life of one person after another.

What prevented the tragedy from getting worse was that another shopper in the mall was armed as well. Ken Hammond, was in a restaurant eating with his pregnant wife when he heard the shots. He told his wife to seek cover and he went to see what was happening. Ken was an off duty police officer from Ogden just visiting the city.



Hammond exchanged shots with the killer and tied him down preventing him from continuing his rampage. Eventually local police officers arrived.

In a shopping mall packed with shoppers for Valentine’s Day a killer like this young man has easy pickings. He can easily kill a couple of dozen people before local police can possibly arrive. The youth, Sulejman Talovic, parked his car in the parking lot walked to the entrance. He immediately shot two people outside, near the entrance. He walked into the mall and then shot a women seconds later and then turned to a card shop filled with people. Within seconds he shot another five people. He fire more rounds and was then confronted by Hammond.

Stopped by armed resistance he had no choice but to delay his attacks and then his plans were full thwarted when Hammond shot and killed him. (Note: The Salt Lake Tribune reported Hammond killed the gunman. The New York Times claims he was killed after police arrived. Either way the killing spree ended when the youth faced armed resistance. See note at bottom.)

Police Chief Chris Burbank says the young man “had one thing on his mind, and that was to kill a large number of people.” He had a backpack full of ammunition, a shotgun and a .38-caliber pistol.

Time magazine reports: “Had the off-duty Ogden police officer, who had a gun but no extra equipment or additional ammunition, not gone after the gunman, the teenager likely would have continued shooting people on his through the mall, [Chief] Burbank said.”

In a situation like this it is simply not possible for police to respond fast enough to prevent several deaths. Within just a few minutes a well-armed killer can kill large numbers of people in a crowded space. The only thing that prevents such violence from continuing for minutes more, with numerous other victims, is if someone in the crowd is armed himself and stops or delays the attack. And that weapon must be carried not locked in a gun case in a car in the parking lot.

Every second of delay saves lives. And we are literally talking seconds here. A good police response time would be a few minutes at best and that will never be good enough. Not because the police are incompetent but simply because it takes time. A couple of minutes with a home break-in or a bank robbery is still often enough to catch and stop the criminal. But when someone is intent on killing large numbers of people, in a confined and crowded space a couple of minutes will never be good enough.

That reality means that the most likely way to stop such an attack is if a killer never knows whether or not his intended victims are able to fire back. It never helps when one disarms the victims in advance by law.

If the image above works you will be able to see how in recent years the right to carry concealed weapons in the United States has proliferated. The map will change every few seconds showing these changes year by year. This change is one of the reasons for the massive decline in crime rates in the US.

(It is hard to tell which newspaper version to accept as to whether Hammond or local police officers shot the killer. In a previous incident at a law school a few years back a student went on a shooting rampage. Luckily this happened in the open and not in a confined, crowded space. Two students ran to their cars and got weapons they owned. When the two armed students confronted the gunman he threw down his weapon and surrendered. In reports on the case the New York Times left out all mention that the students were armed and mysteriously reported that the incident ended when students "tackled" the suspect leaving out the fact that he was disarmed. At that time an investigation of 280 stories showed only four reported the fact that armed students put a stop to the shooting.)

Read an important update to this story here. We uncover why it was that only one shopper in this entire mall was armed.

Is there harassment going on?

We understand from some reliable sources that some members of the Arizona legislature feel as if they are being harassed and intimated by a representative of the Maricopa County Attorneys Office, an office that opposes an effort to reform the draconian state laws applying to "sex offenders" under the age of 18.

These laws received a great deal of attention when the story broke of the prosecution of a 16 year old student who faced a sentence of 90 years in jail. The Matt Bandy case got lots of people upset. Many never realized how a few photos could send a person to prison for life.

Apparently there is a great deal of concern over this legislation from a certain official in Maricopa County who is apparently worried that the reforms will cut the rug out of from under some cases built on flimsy evidence and that it will make it harder for him maintain the high conviction rate he uses in his regular PR efforts.

Excessive sentencing works to the benefit of the prosecutor. If someone is facing 150 years in prison and the county attorney offers them 5 years in jail, probation for 5 years and registering as a sex offender for life even the innocent are very likely to plead guilty. High conviction rates often mean high false conviction rates especially if the person is terrified by the outlandish penalites he or she may face if found guilty.

In the Matt Bandy case prosecutors from the offices of Andrew Thomas charged the teen with offenses that would have put him in prison for life. To a 16-year-old child that is terribly frightening. But that prospect facing him the next offer from Thomas' office looked good. Matt had to plead guilty to the horrible crime of showing a Playboy magazine to three school friends. He would be on probation, not go to prison, but the prosecutors insisted he had to register as sex offender! Faced with such extreme choices he had no choice but to accept the offer. The judge eventually threw out the sex offender status.

Extreme sentencing encourages innocent people to plead guilty. It does not serve justice! In Texas Christopher Ochoa confessed to murder but he didn't kill anyone. Police convinced him that they were likely to get a conviction because he was Hispanic. If he confessed they wouldn't ask for the death penalty in his case. Faced with prison for life or the prospect of being found guilty and executed he confessed to a crime he did not commit. He was later fully exonerated.

The entire sentencing structure in the United States has become more and more authoritarian. And while conservatives applaud tougher laws every time they are introduced they don't see the incentives involved in such laws. These laws give prosecutors immense power over all defendants, guilty and innocent alike. (Of course prosecutors like to pretend they prosecute the only the guilty but only morons believe prosecutors.) Through the use of plea bargains they can basically coerce innocent people into coping a guilty plea in order to have the guarantee of avoiding a much worse fate. "Tough" prosecutors then brag about a high conviction rate without telling people that it is achieved at the expense of incarcerating innocent people.

It is no wonder that the prospect of even some modest changes in this law has a certain county attorney in Arizona unhappy. Phoenix media take note -- don't you think you should be investigating whether this is actually happening or not. I'd love to pursue this myself but I'm not living in the US and that limits my ability to investigate further. But I know that a lot of Arizonans read this blog so I hope they alert media friends to the story and we find out what is going on.

And some final advice to Mr. Thomas and crew. I know this case embarrassed you. Face it, you made a mistake. But don't be stupid. The media and the public has the attention span of a flea. And just as the matter was dying out Rachel Alexander went and resurrected it. Most people look at this case and see major problems and that doesn't benefit you one bit. I would think the last thing you'd want is for people to keep hearing about the case. The more you do regarding this the worse you look. Now what Alexander wrote may play well with some Far Right websites but that little world is not the universe and those people were already on your side so there is zero gain. The Left is already against you so you can ignore them politically. But the vast middle is where careers are made or broken. And this case does not play well with them so the more you keep it going the more you lose. Let Matt Bandy get on with his life and you get on with your quest for power. That way each of you can pursue the most important thing to you.

Now that advice ought to disappoint some of my readers so I will explain. All in all if Thomas pursues this case in the media it will harm him and his efforts will make law reform more likely. I know that. And I know that would mean a lower likelihood that similar cases will happen again. But I can't stop thinking about what this case must be doing to Matt. And I want it to stop for him. The laws need to be changed and I hope my friends in Arizona work to do that. But I don't want to see Matt made into a martyr for a cause involuntarily. On the other hand I'm not even sure Thomas is smart enough to take he advice seriously.