this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Tbf people don’t usually go out of their way to shoot nice people.
So… all those kids in all those schools?
You’re going to make me debate what “usual” is for shootings in the US. That’s a grim one.
Sadly, it’s usual.
About 14k homicides in the US total per year (using 2019 numbers).
About 3300 of these were done with a firearm of unknown type, about 360 with a rifle, about 200 with a shotgun and about 6400 with a handgun.
If we assume the unknown firearms are split the same way as the rifle/handgun split of known firearm homicides then it's about 535 with rifles and about 9525 with handguns. Realistically, it's probably tilted farther towards handguns, just because they are easier to dispose of and harder to recover, but it's close enough. Not including shotguns in that calculation because while there are lots of cases where a given round could come from a handgun or a rifle, there aren't many cases where the same round could have come from one of those or a shotgun.
To continue the breakdown beyond just shootings, about 1500 homicides per year are from knives, about 1600 from other weapons (blunt objects, explosives, poisons, etc) and about 600 done unarmed.
Usual for a shooting in the US is someone engaging in another sort of crime shooting someone else, often someone engaging in a related criminal activity with a handgun. Think gang violence, drug deals gone wrong, that sort of thing. There's a reason gun crime rates are heavily concentrated in cities, and in specific neighborhoods within those cities and it's not because gun control or gun culture is radically different a few blocks away.
You've not met m(any) US cops, I take it?
I’m still alive.
Fair point.
Yeah, like MLK! Wait...I think your premise may be flawed.
Well considering how many regular people get shot, yes…there definitely are flaws, however I did use conditional language “usually”, so you’d have to get in the weeds to judge who gets deliberately shot and if they were nice or not.
Tbf, I still call it into question. Technically "usually" people shoot themselves, 20,000 more times yearly than someone shoots another person. All of my friends who have killed themselves were actually some of the best people, of course this empirical evidence doesn't mean that everyone who shoots themselves is well liked, but in my case it's never the ones you'd wish would (figuratively, it'd be cool if nobody did it) it's always the ones that make you sad.
Furthermore by a large margin most of our homicides are gang/drug related, and while the Crips may hate the Bloods, they do like the other crips and their family members like them too and such, so it isn't as if they're universally hated, but more like most people they're hated by some and loved by others, "controversial" if you will. Sorta like MLK, or Trump. Some love 'em, some hate 'em.
Furtherevenmore? Furthermost? The next largest category can be described as "crimes of passion" which is usually a spouse or business partner. Typically the "liked" one is the victim (perhaps unsurprisingly, those that would stoop to spousal killing aren't so likeable.)
And at some level in there depending on where you source your stats is self defense, which involves necessity rather than likability by definition.
My premise was that someone goes out of their way to shoot someone else, so suicide is right out based on that criteria.
The rest I'm not really thinking is worth our time to quibble over semantics and we probably don't want to get in the weeds about statistics.
For instance the gang members - yes, you need to "go out of your way" to hop in a car and go do a drive-by shooting. But now we get to the people being shot at. Do you consider the gang members being shot at "bad people"? That right there is a deep dive into social stigma, poverty, prejudice, and a whole discussion about personal views and the lives of the people being shot at. Then what if the shooter hits an innocent bystander? Some are perfectly willing to suggest that anyone hanging out with gang members, even if not a member themselves, is by default not a good person. Guilty by association, as it were? Maybe the gang banger was well liked in the neighborhood...still a bad guy?
How about the crime of passion...if there's a gun in the house and there has been domestic violence in the past, but this time someone uses the gun and shoots the other, is that still "going out of the way" to shoot them? What do we know about whether they're good people or not?
Self defense isn't going you of your way to shoot someone at all. That's usually to stop an immediate threat.
I'd argue shooting oneself is going out of your way to shoot someone, that someone just happens to be themselves.
As to the aforementioned gang members, I'd argue that being a "good" or "bad" person and being liked don't always line up, as I referenced with the whole "crips have people who love them too" bit. Since being liked (or rather being disliked) is the prerequisite put forth, I'd argue that frankly most people fit into this category, regardless of gang affiliation. For instance, most people at work like me, but there are two or three that don't, yet the fact that 22/25 people like me means nothing if one of the 3/25 were to shoot me about it, but if one did does that mean I'm unlikable? No, it would edge toward meaning I'm "controversial," as in there is some controversy over the likability of me: Not all agree one way or the other.
As to the domestic violence, I'd say unequivocally that "yes, that is going out of one's way," frankly making the conscious decision on whether another human sees tomorrow is always "out of your way" short of self defense (during which the attacker could be said to put himself in your way). I'd also bet the one not beating the spouse is the one with a higher likability factor, but ya never know maybe the broad deserved it (kidding!) If the one being beat is the shooter it becomes self defense rather than a crime of passion, so that's out.
In any case, it seems frankly that the likability of an individual and being shot is correlation at most, not causation, and truthfully it's more coincidence than even correlation, being that almost every human has some people who like them and some who hate them, almost nobody is truly universally liked nor disliked.
Yeah they do. MLK, Kennedy, Lincoln, Reagan... MOST of the time the person is nice.
One of those things is not like the other... 🤔
A reverend, a catholic, a bearded man, and a demon
He was still "nice" as far as presidents go. Even Lincoln himself was a bit of an overreacher.
Like, polite? Maybe. He was certainly not kind.
What did he do?
Ignored HIV, gutted school funding, illegally sold arms to Iran to fund the Sandinistas, fired 11k air traffic controllers, started the culture wars…
There’s much more, but that’s a start