Flutterby™! : Gun Violence & Jobs

Larry had a link to Forbes: The Best Gun Control Measure Is Always A Job:

Harry Moroz over at Next American City and Richard Florida of The Atlantic, having both analyzed data provided by the Centers for Disease Control from 2006-2008, came to similar conclusions when looking at the impact of inner cities on gun deaths.

Florida wrote, “…the consistency of our findings across metro and state levels strongly suggest that gun violence is not just the product of troubled or deranged individuals, as is commonly portrayed, but is both associated with and embedded within the economic and social context of places… we find strikingly consistent associations between gun violence and key markers of socio-economic disadvantage — poverty, income, education, class, and race. Of course, center cities bear the heaviest concentrations of such socio-economic disadvantage and we are likely to find even stronger associations and more magnified patterns there, as Moroz does for unemployment.”

It's been a while, but I remember digging in to statistics back around when Bowling For Columbine came out, realizing that the U.S. had higher knife murder rates than other countries had murder rates, and that when we normalized for demographics I wasn't any more likely to be directly affected by gun violence than in those other countries. Which essentially made it a poverty problem.

I haven't gone back and verified these numbers, but I now believe that the poverty problem has, as a major contributor, a legacy problem, and that early childhood development programs, education, and poverty intervention programs are how we break that legacy problem.