Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Las Vegas Murders Up 50% from Last Year

Huffington Post

The city's homicide rate for the first quarter of this year is up 50 percent from the same period in 2012 In February, for example, a fatal shooting on the Strip only a couple of blocks from our hotel led to a car crash that also killed a cab driver and his passenger, for a total of three deaths, and just two weeks before we arrived, two died and two were injured in a gun-related, double murder-attempted suicide.
The Vegas police department has above average success arresting the perpetrators -- 75 percent against the national rate of 65 percent -- but oddly, as columnist J. Patrick Coolican of the Las Vegas Sun reports, "In nonlethal shootings, when the victim survives, the criminal is more than 90 percent likely to get away with the crime... In 2012, for instance, there were 313 nonlethal assaults with firearms. Just 20 of the cases led to an arrest." 


And the day before we arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada's Governor Brian Sandoval vetoed a bill authorizing universal background checks for gun purchases in the state. According to the website ThinkProgress,"The bill, passed by Nevada's Democratically controlled state legislature, would have required a background check prior to all gun sales and would have increased reporting of mental illness data. The National Rifle Association's lobbying arm called the proposal 'misguided gun control legislation being forced on law-abiding citizens of Nevada.'"

In fact, an April poll found that 87 percent of Nevada voters favored the background check, but "Sandoval said his decision was in part due to the loud voices of that small minority that does not believe criminal background checks should be required prior to gun purchases. He told a local TV station that he'd received 28,000 calls from opponents, and only about 7,000 from supporters."

There's the real power of the NRA and the gun lobby for you. Not just the money they throw at media buys and at officeholders and candidates -- in fact, last year only three of the sixteen U.S. Senate candidates endorsed by the NRA won. No, it's the sheer stridency and lungpower of their opposition to any perceived threat to gun ownership. 

8 comments:

  1. At 13,000 deaths from gun shot each year one wonders how many deaths the gun nuts will accept before they admit action needs to be taken

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    1. It's not a matter of simply accepting these shootings. It's a recognition first that gun control freaks have nothing to offer that would change the situation and second an understanding that in a world of risk, ill-conceived efforts to give us security theater mean a violation of rights.

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    2. You say that, but I don't think you really believe it. My gun control proposals would damn well improve things. Your real problem with them is not that they wouldn't work AT ALL, but that they'd inconvenience you too much. You've admitted as much in all our arguments over the definition of "inconvenience."

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  2. We were discussing people who whine like poor little victims? ThinkProgress is providing a good illustration.

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  3. Off the topic of this article, but the news is coming in hot: DOMA has been overturned. It's a five-to-four decision, so will you criticize that as one that could be reversed easily?

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  4. "In fact, an April poll found that 87 percent of Nevada voters favored the background check"

    Mike,

    From all of the articles we've been reading here, come the next few election cycles, the DFL will acquire a supermajority and can pass all of the laws you want.

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  5. You didn't offer a comment, but are you using this as one of your examples of "proof"? The easiest "lie with statistics" is the old "percentage increase/decrease" trick. It is often used to hide the true story. Is Q1 2013 really bad, or was Q1 2012 really good? I like to look at big trends, while this author likes to look at quarters of years to be able to cite the biggest difference she can in order to scream "more gun control!". The actual numbers are 18 vs. 27. That's a difference of only nine. That's a bad weekend in Chicago. Again, the smaller number you are dealing with, the easier it is to tout big percentage differences.

    The bigger picture shows that Vegas' murder decrease has been very dramatic recently. 11.6 in 2006 down to 5.6 in 2011- less than half. And 5.6 is crazy low for a major US city (barely above the national rate). But this author will use that low rate to her advantage and cry for a background check bill because it has gone up for three months from a previously very low rate. As if criminals just started buying guns off private sellers and shooting people in January of this year. Why werent they doing that before?

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    1. Mikeb is immune to knowledge of statistical methods.

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