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Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

aeon.co

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Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#101
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting. I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote abou…

> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun. > As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges…

Getting hit with a bullet isn't the only risk of living in an area with community violence. We're not robots who can coolly base our response to danger on a statistical risk assessment. Living with community violence has serious psychological consequences which result in significant, measurable problems for those who endure it... particularly children.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2700237/

Unsurprisingly, the communities who most frequently endure violence are not a representative sample of the US population— they are drastically more likely to be poor and not white. Black communities are particularly subject to this violence, and considering that discrimination against them was not only legal, but legally mandated until around a decade before the first millennials were born, the dominant culture within the US has a moral obligation to address this violence because it's responsible for its creation.

https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(18)31907-X/ful...

Re: Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I said "many places" not "all places"... Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun. > As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges…

Getting hit with a bullet isn't the only risk of living in an area with community violence. We're not robots who can coolly base our response to danger on a statistical risk assessment. Living with community violence has serious psychological consequences which result in significant, measurable problems for those who endure it... particularly children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2700237/ Unsurprisin…

I encourage you to make your argument with numbers. Even if I end up not agreeing, it will be a much better argument. I agree that there are downstream effects of violence, and it's a good point. It's still going to be dwarfed by all the boring stuff (e.g. diabetes). The fact that you think that the "dominant culture" (which one is that? "White" isn't a culture) has a "moral obligation" is, I think, just a result of how you've evolved to think about interpersonal violence through a moral lens and diabetes through a public health lens. If your goals have to do with "saving lives", or increasing the number of hours lived, or preventing unexpected deaths, even among specifically Black Americans, gun violence isn't the road to go down.

Painting the picture of violence as being visited upon e.g. Black communities by the world, or Whites, or the "dominant culture" is incorrect. The vast majority of murders in the Black population are committed by Black people. A black man is ~15x more likely to murder than an American who is not a black man. You can do some contortions to locate the causality elsewhere (like through a vague cultural legacy of slavery), but the evidence is overwhelming that violence is endemic to Black cultures in the U.S.

The sooner we all admit that to ourselves and start working on actual solutions that address the real problem, rather than pretending the problem is things like "they're poor and oppressed", the sooner we will all be able to help them build a better world for themselves. There are many poor, and possibly oppressed (if you are poor can you not be oppressed?) communities that do not have this problem of endemic violence, which is great evidence that the problem isn't one of mere poverty. And it's important to remember, too, that no U.S. populations are poor on a world scale. We're so rich our poor are too fat.

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