Updated. Ok, so my title is goofy sloganeering, but it isn’t any goofier than the common slogan it is based upon. Although the US could certainly save lives by copying some of the gun restrictions that all other industrialized nations…
Blog Archives
Violence has been declining globally. Consider lynching in America.
Tuskegee University researchers looked for records of lynchings in newspapers published between 1882 – 1968 and generated this chart. The orange color are victims whose race is unknown. This isn’t a complete account of lynching victims. It is only a…
Posted in Violence & Peace
Slavery was a core part of civilization for most of history
Updated 4/2/23 What is the liberal arts? The word arts means ‘subjects of study’ and today the word liberal in this context is usually taken to mean “wide-ranging” and “broad-minded”, but that wasn’t the original meaning of the term. The…
Posted in Development, Violence & Peace
Crime is down. Police brutality is down. Racist policing is down. Why do most Americans believe the opposite?
Crime has been dropping for three decades straight now, but about 60-70% of Americans have been misled into thinking that crime is increasing this whole time. I feel a lot safer nowadays partly because I pay attention to statistics and…
Posted in Violence & Peace
Racial progress: compare the riots of 1967 with the riots today. We’ve come a long way baby.
Read this classic Esquire essay from 1968. Police brutality was way worse back then. They just massacred people in some cases. White supremacist militias were more dangerous and shot more people. Entire neighborhoods burned for days. It was close to…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Black lives matter more in countries with fewer guns. Even most police don’t need guns.
As I’ve written before, I’m not a gun-control advocate because there are lots of other factors that can reduce violence that are more politically feasible. For example, Franklin Zimring has numerous suggestions for how to change the rules of engagement…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Is it counterproductive to prepare Bluffton University students for a mass shooter on campus?
Bluffton University is located in a ridiculously low-crime town compared to the average American town. My wife lost her wallet twice and both times it was returned by a stranger with all the cash. A lot of Bluffton residents like…
Posted in Violence & Peace
Medianism 