They’re predictable and stable

Sunday, June 4th, 2023

In Social Order of the Underworld, David Skarbek argues that prison gangs arise naturally in mega-prisons:

The vast scale of mass incarceration in America makes the old informal social structure of prisons practically impossible. The Shawshank Redemption or prison shows like Orange is the New Black accurately capture the reality of prisons… from 40-60 years ago. A few hundred inmates with their own informal social structure, a community: it has interpersonal squabbles and the personalities aren’t the best, but there are old timers who’ve been there forever and who know everyone, and the reputational economy kind of keeps everything in line well enough. If a new guy came in and started smashing faces or started trying to run a protection racket on the smugglers or started maiming, everyone would know, and a conspiracy to deal with the problem would naturally form out of the more respected members of the community.

In a modern American prison in California or Texas you might not even notice a shark was amongst you until it was your skull they caved in. The modern super prison exceeds the Dunbar number by an order of magnitude, sometimes close to two. With 5-10k inmates in a single prison even knowing what’s going on or who the major players are becomes a nightmare. The annual or even monthly in and outflows alone exceed the number of people Andy, Red and Piper would have to keep track of during their entire stay…This is the major cause of the rampant racial segregation: its a natural division that can’t be faked, thus a white or black trouble maker can’t just slip in amongst the Mexicans and start stealing shit, the way they could if you used a non-visual division. This naturally allows the number of people an individual prisoner might have to track to be reduced from all 5-10k prisoners, to maybe 1/4th or 1/5th that, once everyone’s divided into Black, White, Latino, Asian, etc.

This however necessitates introduction of formal race based prison gangs. Because its only your race you can realistically keep track of and punish (if that), any group of enterprising aggressors from one of the other races could profit by stealing from you or fucking you up, and you’d never even be able to identify them… thus you need an armed structure amongst your own race to retaliate if members of another start aggressing, thus the racial division immediately becomes a race-gang cold war.

[…]

Prison gangs share all the characteristics of any other hierarchical org chart, whether monarchical or oligarchical… but whereas other org charts are properly and traditionally visualize as a pyramid with those entry level serfs at the bottom and the CEO or king at the top, the visualization embodying the aristocratic endeavor it aspires to be, a prison gangs are more properly visualized as a funnel or pit, with those entry level souls nearest escape while those in positions of commands most buried in its depths and held down by the press of the criminals they order above them, and the weighty realities of what they’ve done to achieve command.

[…]

The same way prison gangs selected for damned souls who have no hope for life on the outside or mere peace, and the Scottish crown selected for murderers and assassins, the US government it seems selects for careerists who don’t give a shit about the objective issues their department addresses and indeed seem to actively work against the explicit goals of the organization by their affiliated social problems worse in pursuit of greater funding.

[…]

The thing Skarbek comes back to over and over again in his assessment of prison gangs is that very uniquely in the criminal world they’re predictable and stable. On the streets gangs go to war with each-other or overthrow each-other and take turf, men change sides in a subtle dance of daring and betrayal… not in prison gangs.

[…]

The American civil service might be a horrifying nightmare beyond parody… but the old pre-war British civil service was widely regarded as one of the most efficient institutions in human history, engaged as it was in a multi-polar contest for dominance with contingency plans for war with every possible actor from the Germans, to the French, to the Ottomans, to the Americans… as well as potential regional conflicts as far afield as China, Iraq, South Africa, or Ireland.

Skarbek might call this market competition for governance, an Italian futurist might say “War is the hygiene of the world”, a musician might say a rolling stone gathers no moss, a survivalist that the quickest stream is the freshest…

But the phenomenon remains. the devil reigns in hell… because where else are you going to go?

Papers downplay the race of non-white offenders

Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds that papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders:

These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender’s race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the protests that followed.

The Free Beacon collected data on nearly 1,100 articles about homicides from six major papers, all written between 2019 and 2021. Those papers included the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune — representatives of each paper did not return requests for comment for this article. For each article, we collected the offender’s and victim’s name and race, and noted where in the article the offender’s race was mentioned, if at all.

The data suggest an alarming editorial trend in which major papers routinely omit information from news reports, presenting readers with a skewed picture of who does and doesn’t commit crime. These editorial choices are part and parcel with the “racial reckoning” that swept newsrooms in the wake of Floyd’s murder, which saw journalists dramatically overhauling crime coverage to emphasize the view that the criminal justice system is racist at the root — perhaps at the expense of honesty about individual offenders’ crimes.

1% of people were accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions

Saturday, May 13th, 2023

A small minority of repeat offenders are responsible for a large fraction of all crimes:

Criminal and delinquent behavior approximately follow such power laws. It is observed for arrests, convictions and even self-reported delinquent behavior. For example, Cook et al. (2004) compared convictions in a UK study and self-reported delinquency from a US dataset and found that both were well-described by a power law. Other UK data show that 70% of custodial sentences are imposed on those with at least seven previous convictions or cautions, and 50% are imposed on those with at least 15 previous convictions or cautions (Cuthbertson, 2017).

But perhaps the most illustrative study is by Falk et al. (2014), who used Swedish nationwide data of all 2.4 million individuals born in 1958–1980 and looked at the distribution of violent crime convictions. In short, they found that 1% of people were accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions, and 0.12% of people accounted for 20% of violent crime convictions.

[…]

Another notable fact: approximately half of violent crime convictions were committed by people who already had 3 or more violent crime convictions. In other words, if after being convicted of 3 violent crimes people were prevented from further offending, half of violent crime convictions would have been avoided.

[…]

It is clear that people tend to have many arrests before being incarcerated. The data show, among persons admitted to state prison, more than 3 out of 4 have at least 5 prior arrests, including the arrest that resulted in their prison sentence. Going further into the tail: 46% (almost 1 in 2) had 10 or more prior arrests, 14% (1 in 7) had 20 or more prior arrests, and 5% (1 in 20) had 30 or more prior arrests. Indeed, having 30 or more prior arrests when admitted to state prison was more common than having no arrest other than the arrest that led to the prison sentence (i.e., 1 prior arrest). Further, it was more common to have 9 or more prior arrests than it was to have 8 or fewer.

[…]

Data from New York City finds that a tiny number of shoplifters commit thousands of theft. The police stated that nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city in 2022 involved just 327 people, who collectively were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times. Thus 0.00386% of New York City’s population (327 out of 8.468 million, 1 in ~26,000) accounted for nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city. As illustrated by a different study, crime in New York City is not only disproportionately committed by few people, it also disproportionately affects specific local areas. They find that 14% of streets in the city produce 75% of property crime and 10% of streets produce 75% of violent crime.

Who funds Antifa protests? We all do

Saturday, April 29th, 2023

Who funds Antifa protests?. We all do, Andy Ngo argues:

Through a developed network of radical leftist legal groups, like the National Lawyers Guild, lawfare against cities and police departments is the go-to method for payloads. At nearly every left-wing “direct action” or riot, you’ll see NLG “legal observers” move in and out with the mob to record police. This “evidence gathering” is propaganda made to portray the police in the worst possible light while specifically omitting any recordings of what their comrades do.

Independent press are subjected to assault and robbery by others in the group to maintain tight control over the narrative and any photographic evidence. Kyle Seraphin, a former-FBI agent who was assigned to do surveillance in Portland during the 2020 Antifa riots, says the green-hat “legal observers” were linked via radio with the mob and worked as auxiliary counter-surveillance.

Seraphin told me: “My team witnessed several instances of NLG hat-wearing ‘legal observers’ calling out the license plates of suspected surveillance personnel [over] radios — sometimes accurately, sometimes not. These call-outs were met with a response by 5-6 uniformly clad, black-bloc individuals who attempted to intimidate the suspected ‘fed.’ ”

On March 5, an NLG member and staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center named Thomas Jurgens was charged with domestic terrorism for his alleged involvement in a violent Antifa attack on police in Atlanta.

When the NLG’s legal observers and their comrades are arrested, they’re immediately provided with pro-bono legal aid and connections for bail money (rioters often write the NLG’s phone number on their body in anticipation of arrests.)

And then the lawsuits come.

Last year, New York City agreed to pay tens of thousands to NLG members arrested in the Bronx in June 2020.

In Detroit, NLG members are suing the city for alleged wrongful conduct stemming from its police response in 2020.

Nearly every American city afflicted by mass protesting and rioting in 2020 ended up settling and paying out millions in taxpayer money to radical protesters who were allegedly subjected to force by law enforcement.

Denver settled to pay $1.6 million to just seven people.

Austin settled to pay $17.3 million.

The cities, led by Democrats, don’t even bother to fight the cases, preferring to write a check.

The settlement cash doesn’t just end up rewarding the protesters, awarded inflated attorney fees are used to reinvest in the legal groups to grow the operation for the next cause. Additionally, law enforcement morale declines as they are punished for doing their jobs.

But lawsuit settlements aren’t the only way that militant protesters and riot suspects get paid. Bail funds have emerged as a lucrative cash source with progressive district attorneys refusing to prosecute most left-wing riot-related cases.

In Portland, for example, the 2020 riot suspects that needed bail money due to the seriousness of their felony charges later received the cash back when district attorney Mike Schmidt declined to prosecute. I witnessed this creating an incentive for rioters to get arrested, as outside groups covered the bail and the suspect would keep the returned cash when the case was dropped.

An accidental experiment during COVID suggests too many children are removed to foster care

Thursday, April 27th, 2023

An accidental experiment during COVID suggests too many children are removed to foster care:

COVID changed things.

With children home from school and routine doctors’ appointments and other activities canceled, the number of maltreatment reports fell by half.

The New York state child welfare agency waived the requirement that caseworkers visit children’s homes and directed them to conduct remote check-ins instead, unless the caseworker was unable to reach the family by video call, or if a remote visit raised concerns.

And the family court no longer allowed ACS to file petitions for court-ordered supervision; it would consider only requests for removal.

“For the first time, ACS was forced to triage the cases it filed, no longer able to seek court intervention for less severe cases,” Friedman and Rohr wrote. “On every level — reporting, investigation, monitoring, and court intervention — New York City’s child welfare apparatus dramatically shrunk its footprint.”

As a result, the numbers of children placed in foster care dramatically decreased: from April through June 2020, roughly half as many children were removed from their families compared with the same period the previous three years, according to Friedman and Rohr’s analysis.

If these plummeting numbers of reports and removals had obscured a wave of abuse, the authors point out, one would expect signals of that abuse to emerge, for example, in an increase in children with suspicious injuries at city emergency rooms. But as David Hansell, the ACS director at the time, testified at a city council hearing in June 2021, there were no significant changes in ER visits for children during the lockdown, as “you might think would happen if there were more children suffering any kind of serious physical abuse,” he said.

If the pandemic hid a wave of abuse, one would also expect a surge in substantiated reports of abuse once schools and courts reopened, as previously undetected signs of maltreatment were finally discovered. But that didn’t happen either, Friedman and Rohr found.

Suspects were scouting cars for visible valuables

Thursday, March 9th, 2023

The last beat Spencer Blue worked prior to making detective was a primarily commercial district:

There were several gyms near the county line, and just on the other side of the county line was a large apartment complex that housed more than its share of criminals. As a result, I was taking multiple vehicle break-in reports every day at the gyms, sometimes in the double digits.

After talking to so many victims, seeing where the cars were in the parking lot, and gathering information on what was taken and from where, one fact jumped out. From victim interviews and surveillance tape, it became clear the suspects were scouting cars for visible valuables. So, I created a little flier that looked like a parking ticket, and I would walk the parking lot looking in cars. When I noticed valuables visible in the car, I filled out the blanks on the “ticket”. It would then read something like “Ptl. Blue conducted an anti-theft patrol in this parking lot. He noticed the following unsecured valuables in your vehicle _____. Had a thief noticed it, he would have broken your window and, within seconds, stolen your items. Please secure your items in the locker room or hide them from view.”

It amazed me how often purses, laptop bags, and expensive electronics were visible from outside the car. But with the “ticket” reminders, I saw fewer and fewer exposed valuables. Break-ins at the gym plummeted dramatically, so I continued the practice at other locations and solved the problem for my beat until a covert unit could become available and catch the thieves in the act elsewhere. This experience caught my interest, and I spent quite a bit of time learning how to thwart the thieves.

He brings this up in the context of discussing handgun thefts. NPR recently summarized a new ATF report on the topic:

The ATF found that 54% of traced crime guns were recovered by law enforcement more than three years after their purchase. Those guns were legally purchased, but were later used in crimes, the report indicated.

[…]

A huge way those legally purchased firearms get into the hands of criminals is through theft, the ATF said. In five years, there were more than 1 million firearms stolen from private citizens and reported to authorities.

There’s a caveat here, however. Federal law doesn’t require individual gun owners to report the loss or theft of their firearm to police.

[…]

The percentage of these handguns recovered in crimes and submitted for tracing by law enforcement agencies increased from 62% in 2017 to 75% in 2020. And of the more than 1.3 million pistols used in crimes traced between 2017 and 2021, the majority were manufactured by Glock.

AR-15s are mindbogglingly safe

Tuesday, March 7th, 2023

AR-15s are mindbogglingly safe:

All told, in 2019 there were 364 rifle murders, out of a total of 10,258 firearm murders, accounting for approximately 3.5% of total firearm murders. Nobody uses rifles to murder people because they’re big, bulky, difficult to conceal, and a handgun can do the job just as well.

But that’s all rifles, not specifically AR-15s. What percentage of all privately owned rifles are semiautomatic with detachable box magazines, what the NSSF calls Modern Sporting Rifles and the gun controllers call Assault Weapons? It’s hard to say.

According to NSSF estimates, there are approximately 24.4 million MSRs in circulation today. That’s quite a lot, accounting for around 6% of all privately owned firearms in the country. They’re very common. How many total rifles are there? I can’t find a clean estimate. The NSSF probably knows, but I can’t find any published data on the subject more recent than 2009, where Gunpolicy.org estimates that there were 110 million total rifles out of 310 million total guns at that time. In 2009, 35% of all firearms in private domestic circulation were some kind of rifle. If we presume the ratio today stays the same, then we should have around 150 million rifles in 2019, meaning 16% of all rifles at that snapshot in time were AR-15s or similar.

How many of those 364 rifle murders were from AR-15s or similar? If we presume rifle murders are evenly distributed among rifles owned, we get 60 murders with a MSR / “Assault Weapon.” I don’t know of a better way to do it. Even if the rates were double an even distribution, it’s still only 120 murders. How do we visualize 60 murders in a country of 340 million people?

[…]

AR-15 murders are somewhere between “Death By Bucket” and “Death By Lawnmower” in the United States. They’re a little bit more common than getting struck by lightning, a little over half as common as “Death By Bees,” and less than a tenth as likely as “Death By Falling Out Of Bed.” Over twice as many people kill themselves during masturbation as die from AR-15 murders, and triple the number of people die by hitting errant deer with their cars at night as are murdered by AR-15. Feel free to check the sources, they’re in the graph. I have never yet heard a politician claim we were experiencing an Epidemic of Death By Lawnmower.

These weapons are mindbogglingly safe. We have over 24 million of them in circulation, and only 60 deaths a year. This has to be one of the safest consumer products in the marketplace. Way safer than cars.

(Hat tip to Greg Ellifritz.)

Intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness

Monday, February 6th, 2023

Gallery owner Collier Gwin will be “charged with misdemeanor battery for the alleged intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness on January 9, 2022.”

He said this confrontation was the result of multiple attempts to get the woman help, after he spent days cleaning up her mess and letting her sleep in his doorway. He added that she often knocks over trash cans, and her behavior has scared off his clients.

Gwin said he and other business owners in the area have called SFPD and social services more than two dozen times in the last two weeks.

“I said she needs psychiatric help,” Gwin said. “You can tell, she’s pulling her hair, she’s screaming, she’s talking in tongues, you can’t understand anything she says, she’s throwing food everywhere.”

Gwin said on Monday, he’d had enough.

“I’ve been down here 40 years. I’ve seen tons of homeless people, we’ve helped the ones that we could, and I have not had any issues with people,” he said. “But in this case, I was very upset, that the city could not help, and their hands are tied too.”

An FGC-9 with a craft-produced, ECM-rifled barrel exhibited impressive accuracy

Thursday, January 19th, 2023

The FGC-9 stands out from previous 3D-printed firearms designs, in part because it was specifically designed to circumvent European gun regulations:

Thus, unlike its predecessors, the FGC-9 does not require the use of any commercially produced firearm parts. Instead, it can be produced using only unregulated commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. For example, instead of an industrially produced firearms barrel, the FGC-9 uses a piece of a pre-hardened 16 mm O.D. hydraulic tubing. The construction files for the FGC-9 also include instructions on how to rifle the hydraulic tubing using electrochemical machining (ECM). The FGC-9 uses a hammer-fired blowback self-loading action, firing from the closed-bolt position. The gun uses a commercially available AR-15 trigger group. In the United States, these components are unregulated. In the European Union and other countries—such as Australia—the FGC-9 can also be built with a slightly modified trigger group used by ‘airsoft’ toys of the same general design. This design choice provides a robust alternative to a regulated component, but also means that the FGC-9 design only offers semi-automatic fire, unless modified. The FGC-9 Mk II files also include a printable AR-15 fire-control group, which may be what was used in this case, as airsoft and ‘gel blaster’ toys are also regulated in Western Australia.

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In tests performed by ARES, an FGC-9 with a craft-produced, ECM-rifled barrel exhibited impressive accuracy: the firearm shot groups of 60 mm at 23 meters, with no signs of tumbling or unstable flight. Further, in forensic tests with FCG-9 models seized in Europe, the guns generally exhibited good durability. One example, described as not being particularly well built, was able to fire more than 2,000 rounds without a catastrophic failure—albeit with deteriorating accuracy. The cost of producing an FGC-9 can be very low, and even with a rifled barrel and the purchase of commercial components, the total price for all parts, materials, and tools to produce such a firearm is typically less than $1,000 USD. As more firearms are made, the cost per firearm decreases significantly. In a 2021 case in Finland, investigators uncovered a production facility geared up to produce multiple FGC-9 carbines. In this case, the criminal group operating the facility had purchased numerous Creality Ender 3 printers—each sold online for around $200. In recent months, complete FGC-9 firearms have been offered for sale for between approximately 1,500 and 3,500 USD (equivalent), mostly via Telegram groups.

Think about why a person who has actually placed a bomb would call in a threat

Sunday, December 18th, 2022

Within the last couple weeks, Greg Ellifritz notes, dozens of schools have been targeted by hoax bomb and active killer threats:

Think about why a person who has actually placed a bomb would call in a threat. The only reason he would call in the threat is if he DOESN’T want anyone to get hurt. If that’s his goal, he will be as specific and convincing as possible to get people out of the danger zone.

All of these non-specific “there’s a bomb in the building” threats are hoaxes. A legit bomb threat will sound something like: “I placed a bomb in the first floor janitor’s closet. It’s set to go off in 10 minutes or whenever the closet door is opened. Get everyone out of the building in the next 10 minutes or people will die.”

Do you see the difference between the two communications strategies?

It actually places MORE people in danger when you evacuate for every non-specific bomb threat. Is it easier to place a large explosive device inside a public building or leave it in a car in the parking lot where everyone is evacuating to?

Among the subjects was 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski

Monday, November 28th, 2022

I remember first finding out about the Unabomber in 1995 and being shocked that I hadn’t heard about a real-life mad-scientist supervillain mysteriously blowing up professors and industrialists.

I recently watched Unabomber: In His Own Words — in which Ted Kaczynski sounds like a bitter nerd, not Doctor Doom — and learned that his origin story involves another character who could have come out of a pulp novel, one Henry Murray:

During World War II, he left Harvard and worked as lieutenant colonel for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). James Miller, in charge of the selection of secret agents at the OSS during World War II, said the situation test was used by British War Officer Selection Board and OSS to assess potential agents.

In 1943 Murray helped complete Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, commissioned by OSS boss Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan. The report was done in collaboration with psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, Ernst Kris, New School for Social Research, and Bertram D. Lewin, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The report used many sources to profile Hitler, including informants such as Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Gregor Strasser, Friedelind Wagner, and Kurt Ludecke. The groundbreaking study was the pioneer of offender profiling and political psychology. In addition to predicting that Hitler would choose suicide if defeat for Germany was near, Murray’s collaborative report stated that Hitler was impotent as far as heterosexual relations were concerned and that there was a possibility that Hitler had participated in a homosexual relationship. The report stated: “The belief that Hitler is homosexual has probably developed (a) from the fact that he does show so many feminine characteristics, and (b) from the fact that there were so many homosexuals in the Party during the early days and many continue to occupy important positions. It is probably true that Hitler calls Albert Forster ‘Bubi’, which is a common nickname employed by homosexuals in addressing their partners.”

In 1947, he returned to Harvard as a chief researcher, lectured and established with others the Psychological Clinic Annex.

From late 1959 to early 1962, Murray was responsible for unethical experiments in which he used twenty-two Harvard undergraduates as research subjects. Among other goals, experiments sought to measure individuals’ responses to extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray called “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks. Specifically tailored assaults to their egos, cherished ideas, and beliefs were used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then viewed recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse repeatedly.

Among the subjects was 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski, a mathematician who went on to be known as the ‘Unabomber’, a domestic terrorist who targeted academics and technologists for 17 years. Alston Chase’s book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist connects Kaczynski’s abusive experiences under Murray to his later criminal career.

In 1960, Timothy Leary started research in psychedelic drugs at Harvard, which Murray is said to have supervised.

Some sources have suggested that Murray’s experiments were part of, or indemnified by, the US Government’s research into mind control known as the MKUltra project.

Thirty-one percent of the gun owners said they had used a firearm to defend themselves or their property

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

The largest and most comprehensive survey of American gun owners ever conducted, based on a representative sample of about 54,000 adults, 16,708 of whom were gun owners, suggests that Americans use firearms in self-defense about 1.7 million times a year:

The overall adult gun ownership rate estimated by the survey, 32 percent, is consistent with recent research by Gallup and the Pew Research Center. So is the finding that the rate varies across racial and ethnic groups: It was about 25 percent among African Americans, 28 percent among Hispanics, 19 percent among Asians, and 34 percent among whites. Men accounted for about 58 percent of gun owners.

Because of the unusually large sample, the survey was able to produce state-specific estimates that are apt to be more reliable than previous estimates. Gun ownership rates ranged from about 16 percent in Massachusetts and Hawaii to more than 50 percent in Idaho and West Virginia.

The survey results indicate that Americans own some 415 million firearms, including 171 million handguns, 146 million rifles, and 98 million shotguns. About 30 percent of respondents reported that they had ever owned AR-15s or similar rifles, which are classified as “assault weapons” under several state laws and a proposed federal ban. Such legislation also commonly imposes a limit on magazine capacity, typically 10 rounds. Nearly half of the respondents (48 percent) said they had ever owned magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds.

Those results underline the practical challenges that legislators face when they try to eliminate “assault weapons” or “large capacity” magazines. The survey suggests that up to 44 million AR-15-style rifles and up to 542 million magazines with capacities exceeding 10 rounds are already in circulation.

Those are upper-bound estimates, since people who reported that they ever owned such rifles or magazines may have subsequently sold them. But even allowing for some double counting, these numbers suggest how unrealistic it is to suppose that bans will have a significant impact on criminal use of the targeted products. At the same time, widespread ownership of those products by law-abiding Americans makes the bans vulnerable to constitutional challenges.

Two-thirds of the respondents who reported owning AR-15-style rifles said they used them for recreational target shooting, while half mentioned hunting and a third mentioned competitive shooting. Sixty-two percent said they used such rifles for home defense, and 35 percent cited defense outside the home. Yet politicians who want to ban these rifles insist they are good for nothing but mass murder.

[…]

Thirty-one percent of the gun owners said they had used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on multiple occasions. As in previous research, the vast majority of such incidents (82 percent) did not involve firing a gun, let alone injuring or killing an attacker. In more than four-fifths of the cases, respondents reported that brandishing or mentioning a firearm was enough to eliminate the threat.

That reality helps explain the wide divergence in estimates of defensive gun uses.

[…]

About half of the defensive gun uses identified by the survey involved more than one assailant. Four-fifths occurred inside the gun owner’s home or on his property, while 9 percent happened in a public place and 3 percent happened at work. The most commonly used firearms were handguns (66 percent), followed by shotguns (21 percent) and rifles (13 percent).

Crime’s costs are even higher than we thought

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

How bad is crime?, Ben Southwood asks:

In the paper, whose calculations were done in 2006, Americans were willing to pay $25,000 to avert a burglary across their society, $70,000 to avoid a serious assault, and nearly $10m to avoid a murder.

A more practical situation comes when juries award money to ‘make people whole’ for physical injury, pain, suffering, mental anguish, shock, and discomfort that they have experienced due to some illegal action. For example, one 68-year old lady was shot through the spine in a drive-by shooting, and left paraplegic — a jury gave her $2.7m in addition to her medical costs.

If you combine these awards, in a large sample, with separate ‘physician impairment ratings’ — basically how bad doctors think the injury is compared to death — then this is another method of estimating the statistical value of a life, something we have hundreds of estimates for, which typically comes out somewhere above $5m, depending on the wealth of the country and the methodology.

[...]

Their central estimate is that crime costs America $2.6 trillion annually, mostly coming from violent crime. This is about 12 percent of US GDP. By this metric, it would be, in GDP terms, one of the US’s biggest problems, on par with housing. For a country like the UK with a murder rate about five times lower, the problem is probably about five times smaller.

I actually think the American problem is considerably bigger than this estimate, because this study only includes the costs of crimes that actually get committed. However, people try their damnedest to avoid being the victims of crime. This leads to many extremely socially costly behaviours.

What are some of these extremely socially costly behaviors?

For example, one study by Julie Cullen and Steven Levitt finds that when crime rates across the city rise ten percent, city centre populations fall one percent — with people generally moving to the suburbs. One crime tends to push one person out of the city centre, on average.

Quantifying this in terms of a real world city, the roughly 400 percent increase in New York City’s murders from 1955 to 1975 (from around 300 to over 1,500 per year) would have been expected to empty the densest parts of the city out by about 40 percent, assuming that other crimes rose in line with murder. And indeed, the population of the centre city — Manhattan — fell about 35 percent over that period, while the population and physical extent of the suburbs grew rapidly.

Murders in New York City peaked in 1990 at over 2,000 per year, roughly as population reached its nadir in the city centre. They have cratered by over three quarters, to about 300. This would have likely driven city centre population up massively, much moreso than it actually did recover, but building restrictions have prevented this happening anywhere near as much as it might, meaning that it has driven up prices instead.

So this story implies that crime in city cores drives people to the suburbs, creating urban sprawl. If so, then crime’s costs are even higher than we thought.

Most regimes would have great difficulty killing large numbers of people quickly and procedurally

Sunday, July 17th, 2022

The “hogtie, throw to the ground, and shoot in the back of the head” approach to killing people was popular with both the Soviet Cheka and Nazi Einsatzgruppen:

The innovation that the CCP has adopted is to involve a large proportion of their police and judiciary in the process as directly as possible. […] Western governments generally take great care to insulate law enforcement personnel from state-sanctioned killing. The environment and process of an execution is controlled, clinical, and highly restricted. Very few cops ever see the inside of a death chamber. In PRC the opposite is true.

When the CCP decides to kill you, they usually do it outdoors, and often in semi-public places. Regular judicial personnel handle identity confirmation and terminal legal dispositions. Multiple officers are required to wrestle the victim to the ground and hold them there. Then another officer walks up with a gun, and bang, lights out.

Once the deed is done and the victim is deceased, or wounded badly enough that death is inevitable, they are often harvested for their organs. The medical personnel who do this are usually conscripted and not told in advance what they’ll be required to do.

At every step of the process the maximum number of personnel from the mainline police and judicial system are used to carry out the killing. Why? It spreads out the complicity by making sure that everybody who could have blood on their hands does. It’s insurance for the CCP.

The CCP knows that the biggest threat to its continued rule is members of its security apparatus deciding not to do their jobs anymore. One of the best ways to ensure that ordinary cops toe the line is to make them a crucial part of your killing machine. The logic is pretty straightforward: if a substantial fraction of your armed police have directly participated in “social cleansing” of undesireables like petty drug abusers, liquidation of badly-behaved members of minority groups, or outright political murders of people within the CCP hierarchy, it’s not particularly difficult to convince them that regime change would result in them being afforded the same treatment by whomever seizes power.

It’s also a technique for building a certain kind of very evil state capacity. Most regimes would have great difficulty killing large numbers of people quickly and procedurally, but not the CCP. They have a paramilitary police force that can conduct executions at scale. There’s no dedicated roving death squad, no group of commandos drugging people and dropping them out of airplanes, no warehouse-sized gas chambers, no mass graves. Just cops, judges, Maoist collective action, small arms, and crematoria.

Routine, in other words.

More than three-quarters of released drug offenders are rearrested for a nondrug crime

Wednesday, July 13th, 2022

Contrary to the claims in Michelle Alexander’s 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, drug prohibition is not driving incarceration rates, Rafael A. Mangual explains:

Yes, about half of federal prisoners are in on drug charges; but federal inmates constitute only 12 percent of all American prisoners — the vast majority are in state facilities. Those incarcerated primarily for drug offenses constitute less than 15 percent of state prisoners. Four times as many state inmates are behind bars for one of five very serious crimes: murder (14.2 percent), rape or sexual assault (12.8 percent), robbery (13.1 percent), aggravated or simple assault (10.5 percent), and burglary (9.4 percent). The terms served for state prisoners incarcerated primarily on drug charges typically aren’t that long, either. One in five state drug offenders serves less than six months in prison, and nearly half (45 percent) of drug offenders serve less than one year.

That a prisoner is categorized as a drug offender, moreover, does not mean that he is nonviolent or otherwise law-abiding. Most criminal cases are disposed of through plea bargains, and, given that charges often get downgraded or dropped as part of plea negotiations, an inmate’s conviction record will usually understate the crimes he committed. The claim that drug offenders are nonviolent and pose zero threat to the public if they’re put back on the street is also undermined by a striking fact: more than three-quarters of released drug offenders are rearrested for a nondrug crime. It’s worth noting that Baltimore police identified 118 homicide suspects in 2017, and 70 percent had been previously arrested on drug charges.

Not only are most prisoners doing time for serious, often violent, offenses; they’ve usually received (and blown) the second chance that so many reformers say they deserve. Justice Department studies from 2000 through 2009 reveal that only about 40 percent of state felony convictions result in a prison sentence. A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study of violent felons convicted over a 12-year period in America’s 75 largest counties shows that 56 percent of the offenders had a prior conviction record.

Even though most state prisoners are serious and serial offenders, nearly 40 percent of inmates serve less than a year in prison, with the median time served about 16 months. Lengthy sentences tend to be reserved for the most serious violent crimes — but even 20 percent of convicted murderers and nearly 60 percent of those convicted for rape or sexual assault serve less than five years of their sentences.