Responding to the recent cases of people being shot just for knocking on a door, Atrios wants to know what's going on. After all, it wasn't like this back when he was growing up:
Someone walking up the driveway wasn't threatening. Certainly pulling into a someone's drive to make a "u-turn" was standard practice.
Of course it's obscene that anyone is inspired to pull out a gun and start shooting over these things, but how did "someone at my door or in my driveway" start being seen as intrusive behavior at all?
I mean, people shouldn't be pulling out guns and shooting at every perceived threat, but how did these things start being seen as perceived threats?
I have a thought about this. Two thoughts, actually.
First, this might have been more common back in the day than Atrios thinks. Certainly we were all taught to be suspicious of strangers knocking on the door at night. And while I don't personally know of anyone being shot for this, that doesn't mean it never happened. Back then, before the rise of cable news and social media, this was the kind of local story that never went national.
More provocatively, though, I suspect there has been some change and it's largely due to a lagging effect of the great crime wave of the '70s and '80s. As that crime wave swelled, we steadily became acclimated to the idea that threats were everywhere. Eventually we became afraid of virtually any interaction with a young man (especially a young Black man), let alone a knock on the door late at night from one of these suspicious folks.
Over the past few decades this danger has largely abated. Crime is still around, of course, and it's still mostly the province of young men, but it's not much more common than it was in the '60s. We don't need to be reflexively scared of young men these days:¹
But we're scared regardless. Cops are. Families are. Teachers are. And when everyone is scared, bad things happen.
This is why I think the lead theory of crime is important. In one sense, it's strictly an explanation of past behavior: namely the rise and fall of crime between about 1965 and 2010. It's no help in explaining changes in crime rates today.
But it does explain why we should no longer be reflexively afraid of young men. It's because our original fear was driven by a generation of young men who were unusually aggressive and violent because they had been lead poisoned in childhood. Now, with the lead gone, they are back to normal and we don't have to be especially scared of them. It would be nice if people could truly internalize this.
¹The chart comes from Rick Nevin, and it's based on the latest data. More here.
That's great that the violent crime rate has been dropping for years in the US. However, violent crime is still a major problem, in fact one of our biggest problems. Just look at our murder rate compared to European countries.
Well, it's certainly a problem, but it's also extremely localized. Some guy living in upstate New York at the end of a long driveway is no more at risk than someone living in Western Europe, probably less so. These incidents aren't exactly taking place in gang-infested hellholes.
One would think there is a statistic for accidental shootings/suicides ...... hold on, there is:
Accidental gun death (unintentional shootings, like these) are down in the US. I don't know if unintentional includes these cases, which may be criminally prosecuted as intentional.
https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/unintentional-shootings/
Suicide is slightly up, which would include suicide by gun.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db433.htm
Finally, percentage of households which own a gun is relatively stable.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/
So I believe we have too many guns, and these stats are within the US, not comparing us to Europe, but the conclusion is noise on both sides.
Conservative noise that crime is worse.
Liberal noise that there is an epidemic of gun violence as compared to our sorry, standard, violent status quo.
We appear to have always been stupidly violent, and sadly remain so.
What makes these stories so newsworthy is that they are so breathtakingly avoidable to the liberal mind. I wonder (although no conservative would say this, unless, like Oklahoma someone leaves a tape recorder running backstage at an NRA convention) if conservatives simply view accidental shootings of people knocking on doors as an acceptable byproduct of 100 million people righteously having their fantasy self defense guns?
I keep telling conservatives we're pretty much at historic lows, give or take a point or two, but the don't believe it, so Fox News doesn't tell them that's the truth, and they use that to prove we're having a crime wave.
Some days, I feel they are the people caught up in the wave of crime. I even have a name for the wave; the The Great Grift. It's rolling over them right now, separating them and their money and their common sense and, most notably, their ability to govern properly.
Isn't that a pity?
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KD: "I suspect there has been some change and it's largely due to a lagging effect of the great crime wave of the '70s and '80s. As that crime wave swelled, we steadily became acclimated to the idea that threats were everywhere."
If that were true, you'd see a spike in negative news coverage during the '70s and '80s, wouldn't you?
Instead, the big drop in tone toward negative news actually happened from 1963 to 1973. (The late '70s and '80s had a bit of a bounce.)
See Figure 10 here:
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3663/3040
Maybe crime was part of that, but there was lots going on in those years that changed people's perceptions about living in America:
--the JFK assassination, followed by MLK, RFK
--civil rights legislation
--end of Jim Crow
--riots in the cities
--Vietnam War
--rock 'n' roll, hippies, and drugs
--campus unrest
--Watergate
--crime???
Did actual crime surge over those 10 years? I dunno. Maybe it did. I do think the perception of crime surged then. I'm just not sure how much of that was driven by actual crime or by other things.
Maybe there was a lot of stuff happening and crime was a close-to-home issue that worked as a catch-all to stoke people's fears about a changing America.
Of all that was changing, perhaps nothing so much as moving from a Jim Crow/segregated society to a multiracial integrated society. Progress there was (and remains) slow, but fears were high and easily stoked. TV learned "If it bleeds, it leads" was a winning algorithm. Movies like "Joe," "Death Wish," "Dirty Harry" struck a nerve.
Crime as a decisive political issue became big in the '60s. Nixon won on "law and order" in 1968, kicking off a string of 5 out of 6 GOP victories. As Lee Atwater could explain for you, crime was a dog whistle, of course. Blacks were the real problem. They didn't know their place anymore. It's hard to overstate how much perceptions of crime are affected by racial attitudes.
I grew up in mostly white 'burbs during the '60s and '70s, a little oblivious to the great issues of the day, including any problem with crime. We never locked our door, even when everyone was out at school or work. Crime was what happened in the city, not where we lived. We used to joke about our aunt when she started to lock her car in the church parking lot during mass. Innocent times. Now I have a handful of in-laws who can't imagine living anywhere but in a gated community. People like to build their own prisons.
The idea that a robber or some other threatening criminal would knock at my door first has never occurred to me. I mostly see pest control sales reps and evangelists at my door.
I'm glad that my neighbors didn't feel this way when I had a house fire in the wee hours of the morning. After escaping the flames with my children and pets, my neighbors called the fire department on my behalf and took care of my children, dogs, and parrot while I tried to limit the spread of the fire in vain with a garden hose. It would have been quite a different story if we were all shot instead.
Quick! Hide the children and turn the lights and TV off!
That's about right. If someone pulls open your outside door, knocks, and says "I'm here to pick up my brother," they probably aren't planning to invade your home and kill you. For most people, the proper response is not to come out with guns blazing, but to say "your brother isn't here; I think you have the wrong address" or something like. that.
And, yes, I have had someone come to my house looking for Meadow Road, when I lived on Meadow Lane.
Cops are not scared. Cops are trained to say they feared for their lives when they killed someone who posed no threat and have to testify why. If the police were disarmed, the prerequisite to disarming the populace, many would leave their departments because their reason for becoming cops was to obtain the license to kill.
R. Nisbett, in "Violence and U.S. regional culture," published in 1993, showed that the homicide rates for southern whites were 2-3 times higher than the homicide rates for northern whites. The difference was larger for residents of smaller cities than for residents of larger cities. He attributed the difference to an honor culture prevalent in the South.
Presumably, that honor culture was adaptive in the economic and social environment of the South. And whatever adaptive value it had for rural, white southerners, it likely had even more adaptive value for rural black southerns, who had even less recourse to formal justice and even more reasons to rely upon violence and a reputation for violence in resolving interpersonal disputes.
Hopefully, what we are seeing in this graph is not only a general decrease in the rate of arrests, but also a massive decrease in the rate of violent crime committed by young black man - perhaps driven by a fading of that rural Southern honor culture.
I think you need to forget all the crime statistics pre-pandemic. If one measures crime by one's perceptions i.e. their feelings of personal security in a given place and time i.e. fear, then everything that's happened since March 2020 is going to matter and shape those attitudes more than what happened in say, 2014.
A perfect example of this is Andrew Lester:
Two other relatives who spoke with The Star said they didn’t believe Lester was a racist and thought he likely was scared when he shot Yarl.
Ludwig said he and his grandfather, who goes by the first name Dan, used to be very close.
“But in the last five or six years or so, I feel like we’ve lost touch,” he said. “I’ve gotten older and gained my own political views, and he’s become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line. I feel like it’s really further radicalized him in a lot of ways.”
Ludwig said his grandfather had been immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”
“And then the NRA pushing the ‘stand your ground’ stuff and that you have to defend your home,” he said. “When I heard what happened, I was appalled and shocked that it transpired, but I didn’t disbelieve that it was true. The second I heard it, I was like, ‘Yeah, I could see him doing that.’”
Does he consider his grandfather a racist?
“I believe that there have been some positions that he’s held that have been bigoted or sort of disparaging,” Ludwig said. “But it’s stock Fox News, conservative American stuff. It’s ‘anybody who gets an abortion is a murderer.’ And ‘fatherless Black families are the reason why crime exists in this country.’ It’s stuff everybody’s heard at the Thanksgiving table every year.”
Ludwig said his grandfather’s paranoia had accelerated in the past couple of years.
“I hesitate to say he got more extreme, because all this stuff has been extreme,” he said, “and it’s been the same story for decades and decades, and generation to generation of people believing the same things. It’s just nowadays people are acting on it a little bit more.”
Lester, a military veteran and former airline mechanic, was an avid hunter and longtime gun owner, Ludwig said.
“Back in his younger days, he would be involved in shooting sports,” he said. “And I don’t necessarily have a problem with using guns and having guns. It’s the paranoia that I think is a real issue.”
Exactly. If you did nothing else but watch Fox or Newsmax or OANN 24/7 why wouldn't you believe that the "hordes" were out there coming to kill and rob you? Especially if you were already predisposed that way? And even if such stuff is exaggerated by those networks the bottom line there's a lot that happened that IS REAL since March 2020 whether it's been the spike in crime (especially homicides) since 2020, smash and grab robberies, riots and a deadly disease which can isolate and kill you, especially the elderly. And if you use social media it's even worse. I live near the Twin Cities and you wouldn't believe all the rumors that were spread on Facebook and Twitter about busloads of "antifa" and "the blacks" traveling up to small towns in northern Minnesota to tear shit up. People were really scared (even I was) to see something like this happen in this day and age.
The only way to change things is to break that fear and that not only requires good law enforcement to increase security but also more and more people coming together in public spaces or one's homes to just to feel human and social again.