Earlier by Steve Sailer: ECONOMIST: America Is Experiencing the Worst Recorded Increase in Its National Murder Rate

From the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence from 7500 online sources, here is my version of their stats from the last two years:

If you take their row of “Homicide/Murder/Unintentional/DGU (Defensive Gun Use)” and subtract out their Unintentional Shooting and Defensive Use rows, I wind up with this estimate:

In early January, I looked through local newspaper accounts of 2020 in crime for 108 of the 200 largest cities and found murders in that sample (which accounted for 45% of national murders in 2019) up 38% over 2019. I figured the murder increase would be lower in smaller municipalities, so I estimated the national murder toll would be 25-30%. So I find 31% plausible.

If this increase in gun murders turns out to be real, I expect the 2020 increase in murders of all kinds to be a few percentage points lower. But that would likely still be twice the previous biggest increases in murders since 1960: 12.7% in 1968 and 12.1% in 2015 (the first BLM era).

How much we can trust this database, I couldn’t say. But it has been around for a number of years now, and the numbers don’t look obviously implausible.

By looking at which type of shootings went up in 2020, we can get a sense of who was doing the incremental shooting.

• Suicides, which tend to be a white thing, were unchanged from 2019.
• Mass murders with four or more killed by gunshot (sometimes Columbine-like, often with white or Asian shooters) dropped from 31 to 20.
• Mass shootings with four or more shot, whether killed or wounded (like on The Wire, usually black shooters firing at somebody they want to kill in a crowd at a social event), grew 47% from 417 to 612.
• Children killed were up 40%, and 12-17-year-old teens killed was up 37%. I associate both, especially child shootings, with black-on-black “gunplay” in which innocent bystanders get shot.
• Cops killed dropped from 71 to 59 (-17%), while cops injured grew 16%.
• Suspects shot dead by cops was unchanged at 1288, but suspects wounded by cops went up 19% to 941.
• Defensive use drop 10% to 1,432.
• Unintentional shootings went up 19% to 2,264, perhaps because of all the new gun buyers.
• Murder-suicide incidents (a generally white or Asian thing, often tied to domestic violence) dropped 9% to 574.

So, it sure sounds to me like the big growth in murders in 2020 was driven by more black shootings, typically of other blacks.

[Comment at Unz.com]