Gun Homicides & Race

In a followup to his much-discussed “Guns and Race” post, Steve Sailer follows up with an excellent post on “Guns and Whites“, and references:

… [A]n obscure Obama Administration report noted that blacks accounted for 56.9 percent of all gun-homicide offenders over the years 1980-2008. During that era, blacks comprised about 13 percent of the American population, so the black rate of gun homicides was far greater than that of the rest of the population.

While only 13% of the general population, blacks comprise 57% of gun-homicide offenders. The disproportionality of this would be even more acute if we analyzed which blacks were committing the homicides.

In other words, as 13% of the population, this means black women are roughly 6.5% of the population and black men are roughly 6.5% of the population. My guess is that gun homicides committed by black women is very small, which leaves the black male population.

The avg life expectancy for a black male in the U.S. is 67.5 years.

So, if we assume the first four age brackets for black men are about the same in number (and the last age bracket is 1/3 the size of the other brackets), we’d get ballpark percentages such as:

  • 0-14 = 1.5%
  • 15-30 = 1.5%
  • 30-45 = 1.5%
  • 45-60 = 1.5%
  • 60-65 = 0.5%

My guess would be the vast majority of gun homicides is committed by black males between the ages of 15 and 35, which would mean roughly 2% of the general population is committing 57% of gun homicides.

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