By Steve Sailer
10/13/2020
Earlier: NYT: Trump Is Wrong! Crime Is Down! (Except for Homicides, Which Are Up 28%)
From my new Taki’s Magazine column:
Slaughter in the Cities
Steve SailerOctober 14, 2020
Establishment voices are finally, grudgingly admitting that murders and shootings are up spectacularly in 2020. But the reasons, they all agree, are immensely complicated and rather boring.
Perhaps, they muse, it has something to do with lockdowns. Or there could be any number of other subtly interacting factors. Who can tell? In any case, this mysterious rise in violence is beyond the comprehension, much less the control, of politicians. For example, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight headlined:
Trump Doesn’t Know Why Crime Rises or Falls. Neither Does Biden. Or Any Other Politician.
…We don’t actually know why crime went up this year. To be fair, we don’t truly know why crime goes up…well, ever. Nor do we know how to make it go down in the long term.
So there’s no reason to consider the sudden rise in slaughter in the cities when casting your vote this fall. Crime isn’t something immediately threatening like climate change, where voting matters. Instead, the rise and fall of crime is a vast, mysterious process, reminiscent of continental drift in its inevitability, which public policy and media opinion couldn’t possibly affect. Indeed, wouldn’t you rather read about some outrageous tweet by Trump than about this intensely tedious giant outbreak of gunfire?
Seriously, the current shooting spree in our cities is one of the simplest, most flagrantly obvious phenomena in the history of the social sciences. …
Here’s the NYPD’s graph of shooting victims in New York City with 2019 in red and 2020 in yellow:
Read the whole thing there.
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