Crime

A few on crime from Jeffrey St. Clair

+ In the 90 largest cities in the US, the murder rate is down by  12%. If this trend continues, it would represent one of the largest declines in the murder rate in the US in history. But where’s the press coverage?

+ Almost 70 percent of the homicides in the US each year (13,927 in 2019) are committed by people who know their victims and according to the FBI’s own statistics, people in the US are now almost as likely to be killed by police (1,039) as they are by a stranger (1,372).

+ Prior to 2007, gun sales in the US never topped more than 7 million guns in a single year. By the time Obama left office in 2017, the US was purchasing nearly 17 million guns a year. In 2020, US gun sales had soared to 23  million guns in a single year.

The gun sale spike during the Obama years is probably the best indicator of the right's collective freak-out over having a black president.