On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Trei, Peter wrote:

Ken:

I'm sure the apparent discounting of the US murder rate by some American list members seems inexplicable to you. At the risk of being extremely non-PC, I think I can explain why.

The distribution of murders in the US is very heavily skewed towards groups which are unlikely to be on the list, or acquainted to people on the list. In short, there is a large disparity in the murder rates for white, educated professionals (who make up most the membership of this list) vs poor blacks or latinos.

This is true. There's a huge disparity between what I see now and what I saw when I was really poor and had no degree.

If you look at the murder rate for white middle/upper class folk, you'll find its quite comparable to Britain and other European countries. No person I have ever known personally has fallen to murder, a statement which I expect could be made by most the American posters to this list.

I can't say that for sure... I have had a friend from high school killed in what was later called an accident in a court of law. But I think it's at least fifty percent likely that the court was wrong, or applying the standard of a "reasonable doubt" in a case where there wasn't enough solid evidence for a conviction. But I have had several people I've been close to die for some reason other than natural causes. Mostly they just made mistakes with heavy machinery. Mistakes with guns, by contrast, are mostly non- fatal. People who did that blew off a few toes or messed up a hand or got some birdshot in their leg off a ricochet or something. Note that reputation is alive in that society; if it becomes known that you have made mistakes with guns, you are likely to find that no one wants to be your friend because you're likely to die or kill one of your friends accidentally. So it is often regarded as a shameful secret, and often people with minor gun wounds (such as a few pellets of birdshot from a ricochet) don't seek treatment for fear of the embarassment. As Peter says, now that I live in the world of "educated professionals" such things simply don't happen to the people I know today.

While it's sad that people don't factor in the societal risks borne by 'other groups' in this country, it's just human nature.

In a grim fascinating way, it's just efficient use of human lives as a resource in capital production. Those who have the money, and hence the power, are the ones who've most efficiently used their lives to produce capital. Most of them have made most of their production by causing others to be marginally more efficient under their management, but the principle is sound. They are protected, reflexively, by the organism of a human society and the very 'human nature' that you just mentioned. If they were not so protected, we would probably be a lot less efficient at producing functioning societies. This is because we can't afford the loss of those who understand how to produce capital. And we can't afford to protect all people as well as that group is protected. I do not claim that this is good, but as the pygmies say, "Eyali djamba. Njamba, eyaliboye." Roughly translated, "That's the jungle. That's the way it is." And folks, the poor people, the ones who stop to think about it anyway, they know the score. They know that nobody's going to have heads of state come to their funerals, or write books about what they have to say, or erect monuments when they die, and when they think about it, they know why. If you don't have wealth, you have no proof that you've earned the right to matter. There are billions of them and they know damn well that as far as the people who matter are concerned any one of them can replace any other. As someone from a family that lived well below the poverty line the whole time I was growing up, I can report that that much gets drilled into you in a thousand ways as a child and understanding it and accepting it is a large part of what it means, among poor folk, to be an adult. Bear (who has relatives that still think of him as childish, stubborn, and pigheaded for trying to reach a different place in the grand scheme of things...)