A new study claims that the COVID-19 situation “exacerbated” children’s “exposure” to firearm violence and that the increase was more significant among non-white kids. Yet what it claims is not what it found, as it doesn’t even suggest how the “pandemic” might have caused this phenomenon.
What’s more, it uses white children as the “reference” group — despite admitting that American Indian kids’ outcomes were at least as good if not better.
As Time reports:
Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Black population in the United States was already more at risk than the white of being exposed to gun violence. Now, a recent study out of Boston University has revealed a disturbing trend in how that trend evolved during the last few years.
The study, which was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on March 14, shows that in the five years before the pandemic began, Black children, compared to white children, were already at a significantly higher level of risk of being exposed to firearm violence. During the pandemic, that disparity grew even wider, as gun violence across the country increased.
Of course, one may wonder how violence perpetrated with firearms — criminologists’ domain — is a medical journal’s business. Are people sneezing and coughing out 9mm rounds? Will Anthony Fauci urge the donning of bullet-proof face masks (a flak face covering?)? But in recent years medical associations, becoming ever more politicized and shilling for gun control, have made such crime their business.
Also, interestingly, the study authors write that the “COVID-19 pandemic was associated with 1.27 times greater exposure in the reference group (i.e., White children; 95% CI=1.20, 1.34, p<0.001, Model 2) (Table 2). For every racial category except 1 (Native American children), COVID-19 was associated with a larger-magnitude increase in exposure. In other words, the pandemic increased the estimated disparity between non-White and White children.”
That is one way to frame it. Another is to say that the violence magnitude increase was as great or greater still between American Indian children and non-American Indian children. So why are whites the “reference group”?
They always are, too. Whether the issue is income, academic performance, or some other matter, racial-comparison makers will always use whites as the baseline even though there’s virtually always one group (usually Asian-descent Americans) with better outcomes.
For example, some years ago ex-NYC mayor Bill de Blasio pushed the notion that his city’s specialty schools’ admissions tests were discriminatory because they led to whites’ “over-represention” and blacks’ and Hispanics’ “under-represention” at the institutions.
But it was a lie. Whites were actually “under-represented” as well. It was Asian-descent Americans who were over-represented — by a significant margin.
Yet banging on about “Asian privilege” won’t advance a cause or spark any social engineering. It may bring “racism” accusations, though. So the fashionable “white privilege/supremacy” card is played.
Such propaganda was already evident regarding COVID deaths, with blacks’ and Hispanics’ higher mortality rates blamed on “racism.” (The actual reasons are factors such as these groups’ concentration in densely populated areas and blacks’ much higher obesity rate. Also note that, true to form, unmentioned was that Asian-descent Americans were less likely to die from the coronavirus than whites were.)
This brings us back to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPM) study. It doesn’t even attempt to explain how the pandemic supposedly “exacerbated” gun-violence “exposure.” Did a China-born virus somehow induce Americans to shoot each other?
It is possible that the increased crime is at least partially attributable to the misguided lockdowns, which are implicated in causing increased non-COVID death. But there’s another possibility.
The rising violence not only correlated with the pandemic but also something else: Democrats’ anti-justice efforts such as the “defund the police” movement; no-cash-bail laws; the installation of George Soros-funded, soft-on-crime district attorneys; and a climate of lawlessness created by tacitly abetting 600-plus violent left-wing riots in 2020 alone. Oddly, this was entirely unmentioned by the AJPM.
But the above policies created a revolving-door justice system that recycled criminals right back onto the streets and sent the message that they could ply their dark trade with impunity. Is it any surprise violence increased?
This, of course, harms blacks and Hispanics the most because their neighborhoods tend to be plagued with criminals. And with virtually all their victimizers sharing their racial/ethnic identity (e.g., approximately 92 percent of murdered blacks are killed by other blacks), the only whites we could blame for their plight are Soros and his criminal-coddling crew.
The AJPM researchers are short on solutions, too, writing only that “equitable access to trauma-informed programs, community-based prevention, and structural reforms are urgently needed.” Yet a more serious analysis would, among other things, discuss how crime is bred by
- family breakdown. Note that approximately 75 percent of black children are born out of wedlock;
- corruptive modern entertainment. A study years ago found that in every part of the world, crime rose precipitously 15 years after television’s introduction;
- our rampant moral relativism/nihilism (associated with godlessness), which sends the message that right and wrong is just a social construct and that, ultimately, it’s “whatever works for you”; and
- handcuffing police and emboldening criminals.
The true test of whether people really care about those they would purport to help is whether they’re willing to diagnose their “patients’” problem correctly and then prescribe the correct cure — even when it’s unfashionable. An unwillingness to do so is not rightly called medicine, the AJPM should note, but something else: malpractice.
