Disaggregating Data on ‘Gun Violence’
9th April 2023
One of the things that liberals love to do is to discuss trends without examining the relevant context. Suppose we’re talking about childhood poverty, and the liberal wishes you to be concerned about an increase in this problem. Would it be helpful to know how the data are different between, say, single-parent households and married-parent households? Or how would the data look if we broke it down by race, or by immigration status of the parents? Isn’t it likely that some significant part of the trend in childhood poverty is caused by an enormous influx of impoverished Latin American immigrants, many of them here illegally? Yet even among immigrants, aren’t children less likely to grow up in poverty if they’re living in a two-parent married family household?
On this issue, as on so many other issues, you cannot understand what’s happening and why it’s happening if you do not disaggregate the data, breaking it down by demographic categories.