Placing Blame

Ace number cruncher Nate Silver of the Five-Thirty-Eight blog writes the reason the U.S. has a higher murder rate than other developed countries is the high rate of black and Hispanic Americans killing their own people.

Actually, Silver never quite gets around to stating this as baldly as I have. He gives you all the pieces but lacks the courage to draw the obvious, but un-PC, conclusion from those pieces. Let me demonstrate using quotes from his article:

Black Americans are almost eight times as likely as white ones to be homicide victims.

For white Americans, the homicide death rate is not so much of an outlier. It's only modestly higher than in Finland, Belgium, or Greece, for instance, and lower than in Chile or Latvia.

There's no other highly industrialized country with a homicide death rate similar to the one black Americans experience.

You'd have to look to developing countries like Mexico (snip) to find a comparable rate.

Both black and white homicide victims are much more likely to be killed by someone of their own race.

Silver doesn't talk about Hispanics but his table shows they have a murder rate twice as high as that for non-Hispanic whites, making my extension of his overall point to also cover them defensible.

No, we're not blaming the forlorn victims. We blame the own-race perpetrators.