In the wake of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College on Thursday, here are some possibly interesting data.
Christopher Ingraham reports that, as of October 1, we have had 294 mass shootings in this country in the 274 days of 2015. A mass shooting is defined as one in which four or more people are shot (but not necessarily killed), including possibly the shooter.
The number of mass shootings has increased in recent years. This chart tabulates active shooter incidents, defined (by the FBI) as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.”
The U. S. homicide rate is greater than in any country at a similar level of economic development. However, it is lower than in many less developed countries such as Mexico and South Africa. (Canada is in red in the chart because the data come from the Canadian government.)
Gun laws work. In spite of the narrow range of such laws, states with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths. Here’s the scatterplot of the positive correlation between strength of gun laws and state violence rank. (A high rank means less violence.)
And here’s a state by state comparison.
Support for gun control laws has declined during most of this century and is now below 50%.
Support for gun control is largely unaffected by recent mass shootings. This is probably because a highly publicized mass shooting carries a mixed message. To some, it implies that we must control access to firearms, but to others it implies that we need more guns to protect ourselves.
The Washington Post reprinted a chapter by former Supreme John Paul Stevens from his book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution. In “The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment,” he argues that it should be changed to read as follows (Stevens’ five words are in bold):
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the militia shall not be infringed.
Stevens argues that this change would more accurately reflect the intentions of the Bill of Rights’ authors.
Speaking of favorite sports, another is reading news reports of the day after a mass shooting to determine whose “side” the shooter was on. (Come on, admit it. We all do it.) Conservatives are hoping the shooter will be a member of a minority group and/or a liberal, while progressives are rooting for a white Tea Party sympathizer. It looks like the Oregon shooter, Christopher Harper-Mercer, has something for everyone. He identifies as “mixed-race.” (His mother is black and his father is British.) In spite of this, his social media profile identifies him as a white supremicist, and in spite of this, he showed a hatred of Christians. (He killed Christians, while non-Christians were “only” shot in the legs.) Congratulations to partisans of both sides.
On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a public hearing in downtown Pittsburgh on their proposed rules to limit methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas—84 times more potent than CO2—and a major contributor to heart and lung diseases. This was only one of three such hearings—the other two were in Denver and Dallas—so it was a pretty big deal. It’s also symbolically important since it was held in Pennsylvania, whose state government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry, and in Pittsburgh, the epicenter of the fossil fuel companies’ latest “sacrifice zone.”
Two days later, an email from PennFuture, a statewide environmental nonprofit, stated that those who testified in favor of the new rules outnumbered opponents by 92-2! This was a surprise to me since I had read a newspaper account of the hearing (in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) and had no idea the distribution of presenters was so one-sided.
If you’ve read this blog before, you know that false balancing is one of my pet peeves. False balancing occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of presenting both sides of an issue, give the false impression that there is an equal amount of evidence—or as in this case, there are an equal number of citizens—supporting each side. The classic example is news coverage of global warming, which for many years implicitly suggested that an approximately equal number of scientific experts believed or questioned that the climate was changing.
I located four articles about the hearings in the Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Observer-Reporter (Washington County) and StateImpact PA. The Harrisburg Patriot-News had an article about methane leakage that day, but did not cover the hearing. I found no coverage in the national media.
The Tribune-Review led with a headline implying balance: “EPA officials hear from supporters, opponents of methane emissions rules.” Two opponents of the EPA rules, Matthew Todd, senior policy advisor for the American Petroleum Institute, and Eric Cowden, outreach director of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, were quoted at length, but with no indication that they were only two opponents present. Three supporters of the rules were quoted by name. The article correctly stated that about 100 speakers testified and said that representatives of a dozen environmental groups spoke. In all, there were 180 words of coverage of testimony by opponents of the EPA rules and 188 words of coverage of supporters.
The headline of the Observer-Reporter read “EPA hears pros, cons of its proposed methane reduction rules,” again implying balance. They noted that the were 100 speakers and that “environmental and oil and gas industry groups provided widely diverse views.” But their coverage was unbalanced. There were 366 words summarizing Mr. Todd and Mr. Cowden’s testimony, and 155 words about the presentations of two environmental group representatives.
“EPA hears comments on proposed methane rule for oil and gas” was the headline of the StateImpact PA article. The article contained quite a bit of neutral exposition, including an explanation of the rules by David Cozzie of the EPA, who may have been the moderator. They then devoted 170 words to comments by Mr. Todd and Mr. Cowden and 260 words to comments by three supporters of the rules, two of whom were representatives of PA’s Department of Enviromental Protection.
The Post-Gazette‘s article on their website differs from the one in the paper. That may be the case with some of the other articles as well, but this was my only chance to make a comparison. The headline in the newspaper reads “EPA rules find support at hearing.” Reporter Don Hopey compared the number of supporters and opponents and noted in the first paragraph that “most of the 100 or so who testified” supported the EPA rules. He devoted 86 words to the testimony of two supporters and 86 words to a summary of Mr. Cowden’s testimony. The word count in the website article was supporters, 153, and opponents, 92. It had a neutral headline and didn’t indicate which side had the greater number of speakers.
The overall average was 200 words by or about opponents of the rules and 172 words by or about supporters. The only opponents quoted by name, of course, were the two energy industry employees. If you read all four articles, you might deduce that they were the only opponents present. The four articles quoted various different supporters by name. Some were representatives of environmental groups and others were identified as private citizens with no organizational affiliation given. However, only the Post-Gazette article indicated that supporters were in the majority, and none of them stated how large that majority was. I would argue that the lopsided distribution of opponents and supporters was the most newsworthy item and should have been the lead of any article about the hearing.
I will grant that turning out 92 people to testify at a hearing on a Tuesday morning is not a great accomplishment, and only shows that the environmentalists were better organized and more highly motivated. It gives no indication of the distribution of public opinion in the area, where it’s likely that few citizens realize the importance of methane leakage. I also acknowledge that the oil and gas industries could have turned out just as many people friendly to their position if they had been willing to spend the time and effort. However, public opinion is less important for them. Their success depends primarily on the amount of money they spend on campaign contributions and lobbying. Of course, it also helps that they have the news media in their pockets.
I run across a new study documenting discrimination against a minority group—usually African-Americans—almost every day. They are so commonplace that I seldom write about them, even though I know the cumulative effect of discrimination is devastating to its victims. However, since most of these studies are not controlled experiments, critics can usually offer alternative explanations that blame the victim. For example, if we find that black kids are expelled from schools at a much higher rate than white kids, a critic can always charge that they misbehave more often or that their misbehavior is more serious. While it’s sometimes possible to collect additional data that makes these explanations unlikely, they are hard to refute definitively.
I don’t think that reservation applies to a recent study by Dr. Monika Goyal and her colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It involves willingness to prescribe pain medication to black and white children suffering with appendicitis.
The data come from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, a national probability survey of visits to hospital emergency departments between 2003 and 2010. The unwitting participants were about 940,000 children (mean age = 13.5) admitted with a diagnosis of appendicitis. The children were categorized as white, black or other. The main outcome measure was whether they received analgesic medication for their pain, and if so whether it was an opiate—generally acknowledged to be more effective—or a nonopiate, such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen. The effects of several control variables were statistically removed before analyzing the data: age, gender, ethnicity, triage acuity level, insurance status, geographic region, type of emergency department, year, and (most importantly) pain score on the 10-point Stanford Pain Scale.
Overall, 56.8% of the children received some type of pain medication and 41.3% received at least one opiate. These percentages are lower than is medically recommended. Not surprisingly, the higher the pain score, the greater the likelihood of receiving an analgesic.
The table shows the distribution of analgesia by race, holding pain level constant. The black-white difference in receiving any analgesia was not statistically significant; however, whites were more likely to receive a more effective opioid analgesic than blacks reporting the same pain level. (In case you were wondering, the analysis of ethnicity showed no significant discrimination against Hispanics.)
The data were further analyzed by looking at different levels of pain. Severe pain was defined as between “7” and “10” on the pain scale, while moderate pain was between “4” and “6.” Black and white children in severe pain were equally likely to get some pain medication, but whites were more likely to get opiates. Greater discrimination occurred among children with moderate pain. Black children were not only less likely to get opiates, they were also less likely to get anything at all. In other words, there are higher thresholds for both treating black children for pain, and for treating their pain with opiates.
The authors point out that previous ER studies have found that blacks of all ages and with various medical conditions were less likely to receive analgesics, but these studies can be explained away with victim-blaming rationalizations. For example, it was proposed that, since blacks were less likely to have health insurance, they used the emergency room for less serious conditions. However, all of these children had the same illness its severity was held constant. It has also been proposed that doctors are less willing to trust black patients with opiates due stereotypes about drug misuse. However, the current study did not involve prescriptions, and none of these children were sent home. Presumably, they all received appendectomies as soon as possible.
Since this study was published, it has been suggested that the findings reflect hospital policies rather than decisions by individual doctors. Maybe inner city hospitals that serve a higher percentage of black patients discourage their doctors from prescribing analgesics, especially opiates. It probably doesn’t matter to these kids whether they are denied pain relief by a person with a stethoscope or a person in a suit, although these two hypotheses do suggest different remedies.
In trying to understand this finding, I find myself drawn to some of the most depressing studies in all of social psychology—those involving dehumanization. Dehumanization refers to perceiving and treating another person as non-human—for example, as if he or she were an animal. Dehumanization is sometimes invoked as an explanation for extreme abuses, such as enslavement, torture and genocide. Ordinarily, when you see children in pain, you want to relieve their suffering if possible. Failure to do so suggests dehumanization of the victim. Studies show what appears to be dehumanization of black children (relative to white children) as early as age 10.
Social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and her colleagues have done studies suggesting that among white Americans, there is an unconscious association between black people and apes (called the “Negro-ape metaphor.”) To understand her studies, you must know about subliminal priming. A subliminal stimulus is an image presented very rapidly, below the threshhold of awareness. Studies show that subliminal primes improve the recognition of objects in the same or similar categories. Eberhardt has found that subliminally priming participants with images of black people improves their ability to recognize pictures of apes, and vice versa.
In one of her studies, participants were subliminally primed with images of either apes or large cats (lions, tigers, etc.) and shown a video of a policeman severely beating a suspect who they were informed was either black or white. Participants primed with ape images were more likely to see the beating of the black man as justified. This did not occur when they were primed with images of big cats, or when the suspect was said to be white.
Eberhardt did a content analysis of news articles showing that reporters were more likely to use ape metaphors when referring to convicted black murderers than convicted white murderers. Furthermore, those killers described as apelike were more likely to be executed by the state.
I suspect that dehumanization is one cause of the greater willingness of police to shoot and kill black suspects than white suspects in similar situations. Philip Atiba Goff and his colleagues were able to test police officers from a large urban department. The researchers had anonymous access to their personnel files, including their previous uses of force. The more strongly the officers associated black people with apes, the more frequently they had used force against black children, relative to children of other races, during their careers.
The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, on the body.
We can only hope the publication of the Goyal study in such a prominent medical journal shames the profession into correcting this type of discrimination against black children. It is unacceptable.
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