Tuesday, July 24, 2012

poverty triggers shootings

Americans kill each other with guns a lot more than Canadians do while Canadians kill each other with guns a lot more than Britons do. Conservative-inclined states, interestingly, tended to have more gun deaths. Conservative politicians favour making it easier to get guns; ipso facto, conservative states will have more gun death.

 Richard Florida, who works at the University of Toronto and is an editor for Atlantic magazine, looked at all gun deaths – murders to suicides to acts of self-defence – and found them happening less in places like Hawaii, and more in places like Alaska and Louisiana and Mississippi. Gun deaths, he found, happened most often in states where poverty rates were higher, where there were more working-class folks, and where there was more inequality and unemployment. Where gun-related mortality is lower, Florida noted, is where there tended to be a higher standard of living, more immigrants, and tougher gun laws (trigger locks, safe storage rules). And, as it turns out, more Democrats. Places where liberals dominated tended to have markedly lower gun deaths.

What did it all mean? Simple, said Florida. “Our analysis shows fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws,” he concluded.

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/07/23/poverty-and-inequality-the-triggers-to-more-gunplay

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