Miko2d <S>
I'm not sure how long you have lived in the U.S. culture, but you have hit on a very, very painful, infected wound in our country that just won't heal... and it is tragic.
I think I know what you are talking about. The problem is, the kind of analysis you have done has always been embraced by racists, who believe that it supports their agendas, while it's been very difficult for the average person to accept.
To illustrate, some years ago a couple of scientists set out to do a scientific study of comparative intelligence - between the races. I believe that the study was referred to as the Bell Curve study, or some such. The results, if I recall correctly, showed that tested blacks had generally lower intelligence than other races tested. This study caused quite a furor, and there were allegations of racism. I'm not even sure if conclusions were ever drawn from the data. The topic is really almost too inflammatory to discuss. And that is my point. You hit a nerve.
I believe that most people are natural born racists, including countless numbers of people who don't consider themselves to be racist, but are. I include all human beings in this statement, because I believe that racism has to do with how humans think and learn. It takes a really enlightened individual to try to rise above this natural tendancy to paint individuals with a broad brush in our social lives.
Like Pavlovian dogs salivating, like successive approximation training that has pidgeons doing 360's, and like the inadvertant learning kids get from whatever micro-culture surrounds them, human beings are racist.
To exacerbate the problem, racism is often usefull, and a very practical way of doing business.
Example: Racial Profiling.
If the educated experience of the police department (your statistics) tell them that a purple race is doing certain crimes in a certain place, they will organize the data in the way that the human brain is so exceptionally good at doing.
The police may not have a written policy to pay special attention to the purple people, but you can bet that every officer out there who is trying to do his/her job, including the black officers, is going to be paying more attention to purple people. And it works.
(Unfortunatly, inevitably, not all purple people attended to in that way are guilty of a crime.)
To me, that is the cost of being a human being on this blue ball we all live on.
I view capital punishment the same way. Will there be mistakes? Inevitably. We should never stop improving ways to keep mistakes from happening, but life is a chance for all of us and we need to act for the larger good.
I don't want to wander any further off topic. I'm not sure how the incidence of violence with guns amoung U.S. whites in general would compare to other places, but I wouldn't be too fast to draw a conclusion.
Violence is a trait of American culture that seems to be ingrained, and I would think that it might be higher than comparable samples elsewhere.
I'm not sure if inner city/black areas have more incidence of violence with guns, but I don't think it would be surprizing if it were true. Those areas have more of every kind of problem.
It's a mess.
