USA violence: don't blame mental illness. Blame hatred, corruption, and lies.

Last Tuesday I wrote a blog post asking, Are Americans 10 times more deranged than Norwegians? I was suggesting that the United States' appalling homicide rate--10 times that of Norway, more than 5 times that of Western European countries as a whole--must be due to something more than mental illness.

Three and a half days later, someone murdered 20 people and wounded 26 others in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart. Fifteen hours after that, someone murdered 9 people and wounded at least 26 others in a Dayton, Ohio, nightlife district.

There is no agreed-upon definition of a mass shooting. If you use the FBI's definition of 4 or more killed, not including the shooter, we have had 22 mass shootings in the nearly 31 weeks (so far) this year. If you use the Gun Violence Archive's definition of 4 or more killed or wounded, not including the shooter, we've had 251 mass shootings in 216 days.

Are mass shooters mentally ill, or are they just reeking with hatred? Are legislators who refuse to even consider approaches that have reduced gun violence in other countries mentally ill, or just incredibly corrupt? Are people who keep voting for NRA shills and fomenters of hate mentally ill, or just dangerously deceived? Are people who are genuinely mentally ill getting a bad rap by association with these other people?

Jesus wept.

Are Americans really 10 times more deranged than Norwegians?

In the past 72 hours, 104 people in the United States were murdered by guns.

On an average day in 2017 in the United States, 47 people were murdered. About 2/3 of them were killed by firearms.

On an average day in 2017 in Western Europe--an area whose population is greater than that of the U.S.--11 people were murdered. Most of them were not killed by firearms.

The United States homicide rate (number of people killed for every 100,000 residents) is nearly 5 1/2 times greater than the Western European homicide rate.

You're 10 times more likely to be murdered in the U.S. than in Norway.

If, as some argue, the problem is not access to guns but rather violent mental illness or just plain badness, are we Americans really 10 times sicker than Norwegians?

Maybe. Every one of the Western European countries has better access to health care than the United States. Every one of them pays a lot less for it, too. (But save us from socialism, right?)

Though maybe America's flood of firearms does have something to do with our homicide rate. Every one of the Western European countries regulates gun ownership more strictly than does the U.S. (But golly, we need a well-regulated militia, right?)

I don't know if Americans are more than 5 times more deranged than Western Europeans. It's easy to think, though, that we're more than 5 times more ignorant. There are proven ways to save a lot of American lives. We could study how other countries reduce violence. Our corrupt leaders, however, don't want us to do that. After all, there's a lot of money to be made in guns and overpriced healthcare. 

P.S. I wrote this several days before the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Here's a link to what I posted the day after those horrific events.

In case you'd like to see how the U.S. homicide rate compares with the homicide rates of 17 European countries, I made this chart.

All data is from 2017. Follow these links if you want to check the figures on homicides, 

European population, and U.S. population.

A Trump wall everyone will love

Here's an idea for President Trump and his supporters. Let's build an impenetrable border wall around maybe a third of the United States. Make sure that no immigrants can enter. Make equally sure that no Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) who favor universal healthcare can enter. Likewise, don't allow any Democrats (or Republicans) who favor gun limitation and regulation to breach the wall.

To live inside the walled paradise, you must be an American citizen who wants to pay for your own healthcare or health insurance with no help from the government, or to go without healthcare altogether. You must own a gun, because only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns. And you must be willing for everyone inside the wall to get any kind of weapon they wish to have. Don't worry - since everyone inside the wall will be a Trump supporter too, there won't be any bad guys to contend with. (Pssst - you can keep out people who aren't white, if you wish. I mean, you'll be armed. Heck, you can keep out anyone you don't like.)

Only thing is, you must stay inside the wall. Well, unless you change your mind and unaccountably want to have your guns regulated (or, in some cases, even confiscated) and be forced to buy health insurance. Insurance that would help your neighbor but might never help you! And you'd have to live with all those people you don't like. Some of them don't even speak English! Would you really want to do that?

I mean, look at the financial advantage of living inside your walled community. Treating gunshot wounds costs American hospitals some $2.8 billion a year. That adds up to a lot of insurance premiums. If you choose not to buy health insurance, you won't have to pay a dime of it! But anyway, since you'll all be armed, gunshot wounds won't be a problem. I mean, who would shoot an armed person, right?

And here's the best part - you won't have to pay for this paradise yourself. Tell those immigrant-loving, gun-hating, socialist-healthcare-promoting Democrats (and Republicans) that you'd like your own walled country, and they'll jump at the chance to build it for you!

And then, finally, you can make America - or at least your walled-off portion of it - great again.

A nonpartisan plea to American candidates, pundits, political marketers, and my Facebook friends

Please don't tell me what will work in 2016 and beyond unless you also show me what has worked in previous years, or what is working right now in other countries.

Take healthcare, for example. Don't tell me what will work in some theoretical universe. Show me what is already working in the universe we live in. It's not hard to find information about other countries' approaches, costs, successes, failures, and overall health results. If you want to change our current system of healthcare--and I think we all agree that changes are necessary--how about basing your recommendations on some system that is already more successful than our own? 

Or consider taxes. Forget ideology. Look at our own history. When the highest earners paid a lot more in taxes, did business prosper or lag? When the trickle-down theory became popular, did inequality increase or decrease? When taxes were lowered, did we find it easier or harder to pay for things we value like roads, bridges, and veterans' benefits? When was the average American most prosperous? What was the tax structure then?

Most of us want Social Security to thrive, though we have different proposals for how this should be achieved. To those who think the system should be privatized: how about showing us what happened to pensions when they were largely privatized a couple of decades ago? Who benefited? Who lost out? To those who think earned income over $118,500 should be taxed, how do other developed countries take care of their retirees? Are any of their systems more effective than ours?

Or how about the minimum wage? We all want people to be able to find work that will support themselves and their families. Did American businesses thrive or languish when our minimum wage was proportionately much higher than it is now? Was poverty more or less widespread? Many other developed countries have a minimum wage that is higher than ours. Has this helped or hurt their economies? Has it helped or hurt job-seekers?

Or gun control. Are we safer when citizens are armed, or when they are not? What has happened in countries that have restricted gun ownership? How do our homicide and suicide rates compare to those of countries who regulate firearms more strictly than we do? What proportion of our homicides and suicides are gun related? Do countries that restrict firearms have a large number of criminals who use them anyway? If not, how do they prevent this?

Or abortion, a contentious subject if ever there was one. Instead of positing a paradise (for either conservatives or liberals) where no unwanted child is ever conceived, how about looking at what actually reduces the abortion rate? Which countries have a lower abortion rate than ours? Which ones achieve this without increasing maternal death from unsafe abortions? What policies and practices enable women in the more successful countries to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to raise the children they have conceived?

Or foreign policy, or civil rights, or regulation of financial institutions, or immigration, or education, or the environment, or poverty, or ...

None of these issues are new to Americans. We have dealt with all of them before--sometimes with good results, sometimes not. Why aren't we paying more attention to what has worked, and what has not worked, in the past?

And none of these issues are unique to Americans. Other countries also deal with healthcare, taxes, pensions, wages, firearms, abortion, and a host of other concerns. We can see where they are succeeding and where they are failing. Why aren't we paying more attention to what works, and what does not work, elsewhere?

I'm tired of exhausted ideologies. I'm tired of tear-jerking anecdotes about individuals who illustrate your point of view, or mine (it is easy to find heartwarming or infuriating stories that bolster opposite viewpoints on every one of the issues listed here, but they prove nothing). I want real-life, broad-scale examples from history or from other countries, well supported by reliable data.

The information is readily available. If you want my vote, or my respect for your opinion, inform yourself--and then show me what works. In the real world. 

The color of justice

Oddly, I wasn't there the night George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin. I wasn't in the jury box either. Some commentators, like Ezra Klein and Ta-Nahesi Coates, are saying the not guilty-verdict was appropriate according to Florida's "stand your ground" law. (Note that they are not saying that the Florida law is appropriate; Klein uses the word outrageous).

If this verdict was appropriate, though, what about verdicts in cases that were similar except for the color of the defendant? What happened to the "stand your ground" law when the jury reached its verdict against Marissa Alexander--an African American woman from Jacksonville?

And anyway, why should fear of attack justify shooting to kill? It didn't in the case of  John White--an African American man from Long Island, New York--who shot a (white) teenager in 2006 (accidentally, he says, when the boy was trying to grab his gun).

John White, it appears, had good reason to fear the boys who showed up on his doorstep that night. That's probably why the governor commuted his sentence after he had served five months. And White no doubt should have served some time, according to New York law--his gun was unregistered, and if he hadn't been holding it when he went to the door, a scuffle probably wouldn't have escalated into manslaughter.

But, some say, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Is this true?

• Imagine that Trayvon Martin lived by that principle and was also armed when he met George Zimmerman. Imagine they both pulled out their guns and fired, and Zimmerman went down. Do you think the jury would have found Martin guilty?
• Imagine that Marissa Alexander's husband had come after her with a gun. Would she then have just fired warning shots? And if she had actually killed him, what would her sentence have been? Remember than Florida allows capital punishment, and that Governor Rick Scott recently signed a bill that speeds up the process.
• Imagine that the boys who came after John White's family had all had guns. Would they have used them? Would White have been able to stop them?
• Imagine that none of these people had guns. Who would be dead? Who would be in jail?

As it is, two boys (who may have been innocent) are dead because they frightened armed men (who may have been innocent, apart from the fact that they were holding guns). One man (who looks pretty darn guilty to me) is still alive because an armed woman decided to shoot in the air instead of at him. Two African-Americans were found guilty. One man with a whiter face was found not guilty.

America, we have a problem with race. And with guns.

A short rant about memes and rants

We Americans managed to make it past the 2012 election without descending into civil war. We somehow made it past the fiscal cliff without armed conflict (though who knows what will  happen over the debt ceiling). But once again we are at each other's throats, this time over gun regulation.

It was with great relief that I read the title of a forthcoming book from Johns Hopkins University Press: Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis.

The book won't be available for another couple of weeks, so I haven't seen it yet. I don't know if it is cogently argued, balanced, or even readable. If it's really based on evidence and analysis, though, I hope it will inform policy. So far there is little evidence that today's policymakers analyze any proposed measures much beyond the Congressional bottom line: Will such-and-such a policy help or hurt my reelection chances?

Unfortunately, Congressional reelection chances depend on a public that far too often forms its opinions from Facebook memes and emailed rants rather than from evidence and analysis. Alas, many of the "quotes" turn out to be inventions, especially if they are attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Much of the "history" has little to do with what actually happened (see "The Hitler Gun Control Lie," for example). And much of the data, even when not fabricated, is used in misleading ways.

Memes and rants do not create an informed electorate. They do not help us solve big problems, and they do not help us plan for a healthy future. What they do, if we let them, is drive us to political extremes and make us pawns of special interests.

If we do Facebook or email, we can't avoid memes and rants. We should, however, do our best to keep them from eating our brain cells.

Violence : It isn't just about the guns

This is not a blog post about gun control. Everything that can possibly be said about that subject, pro or con, has already been said millions of times since Friday. We are talking too much, too soon. In the words of my rabbi, “Judaism teaches that when there is nothing to say we should say nothing….Sometimes only silence gives voice to what has happened."

We Americans should all be sitting shiva.

But when, next week, we rise from our knees and begin working – together, I hope – to reduce the terrible problem of violence in our country, we must realize that our disorder goes much deeper than simply owning too many guns, and that any effective solution will have to go much deeper too.

When they are distressed, some people clean house or do push-ups  I collect data. All week I have been amassing numbers and arranging them in rows and columns, trying to shed light on the question: Why are some nations violent while others are not?

To answer that question would take a lifetime of research and more wisdom than Solomon’s. The best I could do was to look at the homicide rates of the 34 OECD nations, which are the countries that most resemble the United States in culture and economics, and to compare them with rates in other categories. The best I can offer are correlations, not causes.* Here is what I have learned in the last four days.

1. Despite what liberals like myself would like to believe, the homicide rate does not correlate, either negatively or positively, with the gun-ownership rate per se.** South Korea, for example, has a very low gun-ownership rate but a high homicide rate. Austria, Norway, and Switzerland, on the other hand, have relatively high gun-ownership rates but low homicide rates. Japan has low rates all around – very few guns, very few homicides – while the United States has high rates of both gun ownership and homicide.

2. Despite what some preachers (and atheists) have claimed, the homicide rate does not correlate, either negatively or positively, with religiosity. The United States is highly religious and highly homicidal. Japan is barely religious and has almost no homicides. Most nations, though, are an unpredictable mixture of spirituality and savagery.

3. There appears to be some correlation between high homicide rates and a high degree of economic inequality. This seems particularly evident in Mexico, Estonia, the United States, and Chile, who all have lots of homicides and a great gap between rich and poor.

4. The homicide rate correlates most strikingly with three other rates:

• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the more likely it is to have a high rate of military expenditures.
• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the less likely it is to have an effective healthcare system.
• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the less likely its students are to earn high scores in mathematics.

In other words, if you want to identify homicidal OECD nations, look for the ones with the strongest militaries and the weakest social services. 

In case you’re wondering, of the 34 OECD nations, the United States has the third-highest homicide rate. We also have the highest number of guns per 100 residents and the fourth-highest rate of military expenditures (for what is by far the most expensive military in the world). At the same time we have the third highest income-inequality rate. In healthcare outcomes we are in 24th place, and in mathematical achievement we are tied with Portugal and Ireland for 25th place.

Sixty years ago President Eisenhower warned us about the path we were taking:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. ... Is there no other way the world may live?

Today President Obama announced that Vice-President Biden will "lead an exploration of options" regarding "the renewal of an assault weapons ban, limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and an end to loopholes allowing gun purchases with no background checks."

Such options, if legislated and enforced, might well decrease our appalling homicide rate. They will not, however, reduce our huge military outlay. They will not make our healthcare and educational systems competitive with those of other nations. And until we prioritize people over power, we are likely to continue down our violent path.

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* This research is about correlation, not causation. Two facts - we'll call them A and B - coexist. A may cause B. On the other hand, B may cause A. Some other fact may cause both A and B. Or A and B may have nothing to do with one another. For example, eating chocolate may cause migraine headaches. On the other hand, an incipient migraine headache may cause a person to crave chocolate. Or possibly some alteration in brain chemistry may cause a person both to crave chocolate and to get a migraine. Or maybe chocolate and migraines are totally unrelated. It takes wisdom, common sense, and often hindsight to sort out how, and if, coexisting facts are causally related.

** I have not studied OECD gun laws, so I do not know what kinds of guns are involved in these countries, who can legally purchase them, or what background checks or training are required before purchase. Nor do I know how laws may have changed over the last couple of decades, or how homicide and gun-ownership rates may have changed in response to changed legislation. Any of those factors could affect their homicide rates.