My Blog

Category: Society

  • Shot vs. Shot & Killed – The Miracle of Modern Medicine

    This post was originally drafted in April.  Bare with me… very current story cited below.

    I’ve mentioned before that the shooting to death ratio appears very low to me. Crime stats over at Crime in Chicago suggest that in 2011 2,217 were shot, with 441 dead – 19.9% (ratio of 5:1.)  So far in 2012 we have 2,670+ shot, 532 dead – 19.9% (ratio of 5:1.)  What I have been looking for, and cannot could not find, is what these numbers were in 1975, 1985, and 1995.

    In the book Can Gun Control Work, James Jacobs writes in a footnote on pg 8 that, “Nonfatal gun injuries are complicated to compute.  Gary Kleck reasonably estimates the ratio of nonfatal gun wounds to gun fatalities at 3:1 during the 1990’s.”  Jacobs suggest we see Point Blank by Gary Kleck.  A search of Point Blank on Google Scholar does not yield that ratio.

    In 1991 Chicago has 927 homicides.  If the 3:1 ratio Kleck cites is accurate that means around 2,781 people were shot in Chicago in 1991.  That’s damn near the exact number we had last year!!

    Neat speculation but nothing scientific.

    Enter today’s WSJ:

    The number of U.S. homicides has been falling for two decades, but America has become no less violent.

    Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.  …

    In other words, more people in the U.S. are getting shot, but doctors have gotten better at patching them up. Improved medical care doesn’t account for the entire decline in homicides but experts say it is a major factor.  …

    “Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn’t save even 10 years ago,” said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  …

    At the same time [that homicide deaths are declining], medical data and other surveys in the U.S. show a rising number of serious injuries from assaults with guns and knives. The estimated number of people wounded seriously enough by gunshots to require a hospital stay, rather than treatment and release, rose 47% to 30,759 in 2011 from 20,844 in 2001, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-All Injury Program. The CDC estimates showed the number of people injured in serious stabbings rose to 23,550 from 22,047 over the same period.Mortality rates of gunshot victims, meanwhile, have fallen, according to research performed for The Wall Street Journal by the Howard-Hopkins Surgical Outcomes Research Center, a joint venture between Howard University and Johns Hopkins University. In 2010, 13.96% of U.S. shooting victims died, almost two percentage points lower than in 2007. (Earlier data used different standards, making comparisons useless.)

    GunsShotDeaths_WSJ

    So there!!  I knew I was on to something.

    So the next time Rahm and McCarthy are out running their gums about how “safe” everything is and that “crime is down, crime is down!” Now you know that maybe some crime is down… but the odds of getting shot in this town are just about the same as they were in 1991. … Which is not very good at all.

  • 5 Found Shot in French Alps

    NOTE:  This is a story from 09/05/2012 that was stuck in the “draft” folder.  Still as timely as ever.

    French authorities say five people, including a teenage girl, have been shot in a forest in the Alps. All five were initially reported to be dead. The teenage victim is now reported to be in critical condition in a hospital, according to a local prosecutor.

    An official with the regional administration for the Haute-Savoie region says three of the bodies were found in a BMW registered in Britain.

    The Sipa news agency says the girl was found alive with bullet wounds on a forest road.

    It happened in a forest near Chevaline, near Annecy lake, in Haute-Savoie.

    The initial reports said a cyclist discovered the girl, the three bodies in the car and a fourth body, of a cyclist lying nearby.

    The identity of the victims is unclear. The British Foreign Office says it is aware of reports of the incident and is looking into it.

    via Fox New York.

    Wait a minute… how is that possible?  I mean, guns are just about completely outlawed in Europe (the Swiss being the notable exception.)

    It appears that no matter how strict the gun laws become there will always be some nut who’s willing to break the “Gun Control” law.   i.e.  to rob or kill.

  • Obama Voters’ Gun Problem

    Obama voters are killing each other

    Chicago’s murder numbers have hit that magic 500. Baltimore’s murder toll has passed 200. In Philly, it’s up to 324, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it’s approaching 400, another record. In New Orleans, it’s almost at 200. New York City is down to 414 from 508. In Los Angeles, it’s over 500. In St. Louis it’s 113 and 130 in Oakland. It’s 121 in Memphis and 76 in Birmingham.  …

    … It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.

    Chicago’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, the Midwestern 4.5 or the Illinois’ 5.6 rates, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war or decades of tyranny.

    But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be New Orleans which at an incredible 72.8 murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. If New Orleans were a country, it would have the 2nd highest murder rate in the world, beating out El Salvador.

    Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17.

    St. Louis has a murder rate just a little lower than Belize. Baltimore has a worse murder rate than South Africa and Detroit has a worse murder rate than Colombia. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.

    Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among the Romney voters rushing to stock up on assault rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.  …

    Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle which is agonizing over its 26 murders. That’s about the same number of murders as East St. Louis which has only 27,000 people to Seattle’s 620,000.So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell ahead of Zimbabwe and Rwanda?

    A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.

    Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico, and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.

    America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.

    via Front Page Magazine.

    A fine read as to what’s really happening on the streets.

    The fact of the matter remains that Democrats cannot control their own.  They are crime ridden to the core; they do not believe in the rule of law.  Obama himself simply ignores laws he doesn’t like.

    Crazy.

     

     

  • How Liberty Dies

    People who wanted a little bit of security in lieu of liberty.

  • Armed Guards at Schools… Common

    Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools — about one-third of all public schools — already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data, for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days.

    via NYTimes.com.

    NRA proposal not out of line by any stretch of the imagine.

  • Obama’s Daughters’ School Has 11 Armed Guards

    The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak.   …

    If you dismiss this by saying, “Of course they have armed guards — they get Secret Service protection,” then you’ve missed the larger point.

    The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period. And this is the reason people like NBC’s David Gregory send their kids to Sidwell, they know their kids will be protected from the carnage that befell kids at a school where armed guards weren’t used (and weren’t even allowed).

    Shame on President Obama for seeking more gun control and for trying to prevent the parents of other school children from doing what he has clearly done for his own. His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.

    via School Obama’s Daughters Attend Has 11 Armed Guards.

    Draw your own conclusions.

  • Gun Background Checks Jump in Illinois

    Illinois State Police information provided to The Associated Press shows that 12,557 checks were conducted through the state’s Firearms Transfer Inquiry Program between Friday and Tuesday. There were 6,870 checks during she same period a year earlier.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Jump?  Nearly double!

  • Woman Attacked With Human Feces Filled Sock

    A woman riding the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line in Oak Park told police she was last week attacked by another passenger wielding a sock filled with human feces.

    “He had a sock full of his poop on me,” the 21-year-old college student told the Pioneer Press. “It was everywhere; on my face, my hair, my clothes.”

    via NBC Chicago.

    This is the level to which Chicago has sunk.

    The comments on the article are priceless.

  • Pearl High School Shooting: Oct. 1, 1997

    I am not insane, I am angry.  I am a cross dresser.  I killed because people like me are mistreated every day.  I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. … All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated.  Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do?  Yes, you will. … It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help.  It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can’t pry your eyes open, if I can’t do it through pacifism, if I can’t show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.
    — Luke Woodham, Shooter

    via Wikipedia

    The parallels to Newton are spooky:  Smart kid starts the day by killing his mother and then going to a school to kill as many as he can.

    At Pearl High School however Luke Woodham was stopped by the school’s principal who ran out to his truck a retrieved his .45 handgun.

    The Wiki article is short.  Worth reading.  Newton could have been very very different if someone in or very near that school was armed.

  • On Newton CT

    I wrote this as a comment on the Chicago Tribune story:

    While our hearts and prayers go out to the people of Newton CT the sad reality is that 18 children and 6 adults killed is what we in Chicago call the “Second and Third Week in July” every year.

    Where is our national media attention? When will New York (liberal) reporters be seen in Englewood and Garfield Park interviewing parents of the slain?

    I hate to play the race card but I see no other reason why Chicago’s murders are ignored by the national media. Most of Chicago’s victims are black while in Aurora CO and in Newton CT the victims are mostly white.

    While you ponder the sadness today over yesterdays events in Newton CT please also keep in mind the hundreds of (mostly black) children gunned down every year on Chicago’s city streets.