Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Yesterday I mentioned what I thought was the largest problem in that David S. Fallis Washington Post article on Realco: The failure to mention that the shop is the one nearest the District of Columbia and located in an overwhelmingly black (and high crime) area.

However, reading through that article, I couldn’t help be struck by all the other information Fallis and the Post seemed uninterested in pursuing because they thought of this as a gun story rather than a crime story. Instead of spending all that time pouring through 35,000 gun traces, they could have taken the same 18-year period they traced 86 guns (i.e. roughly 4.8 guns a year involved in homicide) back to Realco, and looked at all (by my count) 4,911 homicides in the District of Columbia. They could have looked at each convicted offender (certainly less than the 4,911 number) and tried to find out:

• Which had already committed felonies
• Which already had a warrant out for their arrest at the time they murdered someone
• Which were on probation at the time they murdered someone
• What level of education they had obtained before committing their crime (how many were high school dropouts)
• Which came from single-parent homes
• Which came from homes where the primary source of income was government welfare
• How many were involved in the illegal drug trade
• The race of the murderer
• The race of the victim
• Sex of the murderer (almost certainly overwhelmingly male)
• Sex of the victim (ditto, though I suspect less overwhelmingly)
• If the murderer already knew their victim
• Etc.

A comprehensive look at all those variables would have provided a valuable, multifaceted look at inner city crime in the DC area, and could have generated real insights into the problems and possible solutions to them.

Sadly, I suspect such a project would have seemed far less sexy to Washington Post editors than yet another “Guns are bad, mmmkay?” article to pander to their core liberal readership.