Obama's gun-control tears - pass the sick-bag, Alice...

The BBC News Channel and Sky both seemed to have Obama blubbing about gun control on a loop yesterday afternoon - possibly to make up for the aching slowness with which Jeremy Corbyn was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  Or maybe TV News lefties simply experienced a tingle up their legs at the leader of the world's most powerful country being human enough to burst into tears because he can't get his own way - left-wingers live in a bi-polar world, yawing wildly between extreme cynicism and gross sentimentality.

Personally, I found the spectacle of Obama emoting rather revolting - especially when he talked about kids being killed in his home town of Chicago every day (the city was recently named America's mass-shooting capital), as if that were the fault of mean, gun-crazy Republicans rather than the Democratic Party politicians who actually run Chicago and practically every other US city where gun crime is rampant, and the black gangs who are responsible for so many gun murders.

In Chicago in 2011, 61% of homicides were committed by gang members. Chicago is thought to have more gangs than any other US city, with approximately 100,000 members. One presumes that the vast majority are black. (Figures are hard to come by, because that would be racist, but I somehow doubt that Asian-Americans or whites are the Windy City's main problem.) Again, I doubt if most of the guns involved in these murders were obtained legally - it's believed that approximately 3% of guns used for criminal purposes are legally purchased by the person who fires them (see this article).

Obama must know that well over 90% of gun murders in America aren't committed by people who buy guns legally, and that his proposals to tighten up background checks won't make a spitball's worth of difference to the number of black gangbangers (if that's still the preferred term) slaughtering other black gangbangers (or their family members or innocent bystanders). But he knows that turning on the waterworks at the idea of inner city black criminals offing other inner city black criminals won't similarly agitate the tear-ducts of most Americans (including, one suspects, all sensible black Americans). So he tends to highlight mass shootings where the victims couldn't have been less deserving of their horrible fate. This goes down well with America's left-wing media, of course, and it plays sensationally well in Europe (see the front pages of today's newspapers - but not if you just ate), where it's assumed that most legitimate American gun-owners are white, single IQ, racist, survivalist rednecks who'd reintroduce slavery quicker than they could form a lynch party (cue early '60s news footage of white Southerners being beastly to black protestors, Martin Luther King intoning "I have a dream", and Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" playing in the background).

One problem for Obama is that, while America's headline homicide rate is incredibly high for a rich country - about four-and-a-half times higher than Britain's, for instance - the homicide rate for white Americans is less than half the overall US rate (2.5 versus 5.2 deaths per 100,000). That's quite a bit lower than, for instance, Cuba (4.2), Latvia (3.8) or Chile (3.3) and only a bit higher than Finland, Belgium and Greece. Nothing to crow about, certainly, but hardly surprising, given the traditional attachment of Americans to the concept of gun ownership. (Yes, I know I've suddenly flipped from figures for gun homicides to all homicides, but these are the only ones I've found that break the stats down racially - gun homicides account for two-thirds of all murders in America. The figures I'm using are an average for 2010-2012, and more details can be found here.)

White American homicide victim rates aren't that high, especially given that guns outnumber people. When it comes to figures for black homicide victims, the rate is appalling - almost eight times higher than it is for whites at 19.4 per 100,000: and more than nine out of ten of those black deaths are caused by other blacks. (The rate for Hispanics is more than double that for whites at 5.2 per 100,000, but less than 30% of the rate for blacks.)

The conclusion seems obvious: US homicide rates are a problem for all Americans - but they're only a crisis for city-dwelling black Americans. I suspect that many rural or suburban gun-owners will be wondering how making it more difficult for them to get hold of guns legally is going to stem the grotesque number of murders of blacks committed by other blacks using illegal handguns.  (And there's the somewhat embarrassing fact that, proportionately, when it comes to choosing victims, violent black criminals are ten times more likely to attack whites than vice-versa.)

If the President hadn't spent the last seven years blaming the NRA and its supporters, Republican politicians and Tea Party members for US homicide rates, indulging in emotional posturing (what is he - five years old?), had explained exactly how he was going to get illegal guns out of the hands of ghetto criminals, and, instead of trying to foist unilateral disarmament on law-abiding gun-owners, had offered rational arguments for curbing legal gun sales and practical proposals for disarming criminals, I suspect he might have got somewhere on this issue.