Guns, murder, and race

Stolen from the comment section of Steve Sailer’s excellent blog.

Someone who wishes to remain anonymous has assembled data showing that American whites murder at about the same rate as whites in countries with strict gun control, American “Hispanics” murder at about the same rate as they do in their native countries, which generally have strict gun control, and that American blacks murder at about the same rate as blacks do world wide, mostly in countries with strict gun control.

homicide rate by racial group and national IQ



The main factor by far in homicide rates is race.

Another significant factor is national IQ.   East Asians in high IQ countries have markedly lower murder rates than East Asians in low IQ countries.  Similarly, Central Americans.  Possibly high IQ nations carry out policies discouraging murder more effectively than low IQ nations, and members of high IQ races are more easily influenced by such pressures.  Blacks, however, seem unaffected by the national IQ.

Anonymous explains how he constructed the graph:

I took the step of plotting homicide rate vs IQ of country. There is a very definite link between IQ and homicide rate, and it seems mainly to function as an upper bound. That is, the higher the IQ of the country, the lower the possible homicide rate. Higher IQ seems to be a civilizing factor. But within the greater homicide rates seemingly afforded by lower IQ, there is a great deal of variance. There are some relatively non-homicidal, low IQ populations. So there is more at work here than IQ.

Looking at the country table and clicking to sort by sub-region, the exceptions stuck out.

It seemed evident to me that the exceptions were probably of an racial/ethnic nature. …

  1. The geographically logical groupings that wikipedia uses are roughly similar to racial groupings.
  2. The genetic maps of the world made by Cavalli Sforza shows racial clines that more closely matches the variation seen in the homicide rates, and would explain the exceptions (note that this map does not include modern settlement).
    The big sub-region exception in North Africa vs Sub-Saharan Africa is well explained genetically, being more Arab than African.
  3. Colonies consisting primarily of founding country ethnic stock (e.g. Southern Europe -> Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Western/Northern Europe -> USA, Australia, Canada) have homicide rates very similar to the founding countries.

So I separated homicide rate vs. country IQ by racial grouping, to make this relation clearer. (I cribbed this idea from La Griffe Du Lion) I used marker color to divide the broad racial categories – Europeans, Asians/North Africans, Amerinds, and Africans. Within those I selected regions, especially when I knew that there was relatedness, I grouped close ethnicities together as best I could.

Because of the topical nature of USA homicide rates, I also broke out the largest racial groupings within the USA – whites, blacks and Hispanics (mostly Amerind). Once broken out like that, it is evident that within that country, the homicide rates appear to be largely of a racial origin. The USA’s white homicide rate of around ~2/100k fits perfectly within the European range, including the areas from which most of its white people are drawn (Western, Northern-Germanic, Southern Europe). The USA’s black homicide rate is very similar to that of the West/Central African areas from which the slaves were taken (e.g. Benin, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Cote I’voire, Siera Leone, Angola etc.). The Hispanic homicide rate appears to be very similar to that of Mexico, where most of the Hispanic population comes from. I used the FBI stats to tease this information out.

Because the data suits a log scale better, I graphed it that way here:

… race/ethnicity is a very good predictor of homicide rate. It is very hard to make an honest case that gun ownership is much of a factor at all in causing homicides. The evidence suggests that people(s) kill people, not guns. In heavily armed Switzerland, white USA, Serbia etc., the homicide rate is low. In mostly disarmed Netherlands, Poland and Italy, the homicide rate is also low. The common factor here is the European background.

In sub-Saharan African areas with more guns (Equatorial Guinea, Angola), homicide rates are high. In sub-Saharan African areas that have very few guns (Ghana, Ethiopia, Eritrea, in fact most of sub-Saharan Africa) homicide rates are also high. The common factor here is the sub-Saharan racial background.

Anonymous suggests that instead of gun control, we apply ….

That black homicide rates seem to be insensitive to national IQ is consistent with the eighteenth century belief that to maintain acceptable behavior among a black population requires forms of coercion more extreme and direct than are required for other races.

24 Responses to “Guns, murder, and race”

  1. zippo the pinhead says:

    I’m curious (because I’m undecided on the subject) whether you think it matters to make a meaningful distinction between homicide as a vector of fatal violence, and the overall idea that dead is dead is dead.

    For instance when I was kid growing up in a working-class Army-cannon-fodder-type community in the Seventies, I figured my chances of someday being stabbed to death by a negro mugger three blocks from my house, and being shot to death on the other side of the planet in some moronic imperialistic war were roughly equal. From my POV at the time, dead was dead was dead, and the violence of subliterate negroes or the machinations of Uncle Sam would tend to make me equally dead.

    To take different examples: the Chinese are relatively high IQ, have fairly high social cohesion, low levels of individual homicide. But every so often, when they get one of their psychotic irrational mass movements going, whether it’s the Tai-p’ings or the Cultural Revolution, the body count spikes like nobody’s business. European gun deaths are fairly low right now; but if you averaged them in over the course of a mere century with European gun deaths in oh, 1914-18 or 1939-45, you get a very different picture.

    Obviously graphs like the above are very useful for thinking about policy on a micro scale (“what do we do, or not do, about gun violence in southern Indiana?”). I’m curious, not on a policy scale but on a philosophical scale, about how one views or ought to view the data, in a macro context.

    • Red says:

      I’ve assumed for a while that black violence is simply their form of genetic selection. Mass war and using execution to cull negative traits out of the population is the Asian/White method genetic selection.

      Sooner or later random violence against whites will result in all the blacks being killed or expelled. It’s simply the nature of Caucasians. It may require a revolt on the scale that kills all the elites to get it done though. Whites are almost out of places to run and elites are rerunning the 1960-70s levels of insanity by letting harden black criminals out of jail in large numbers while trying to disarm the white populace.

      • zippo the pinhead says:


        Except that mass war has a tendency to cull positive traits out of a population, not negative. Who gets killed in mass war? Young, physically fit eligible bachelors with a strong sense of duty and courage, and sufficiently high IQ to function in an army corps. As a method of genetic selection, it doesn’t strike me as being very bright. Wars for territorial conquest can arguably have a payoff that makes the sacrifice worth it, but the two European world wars were fought to a territorial standstill, over essentially nothing. When you factor in the American Civil War, the other great recent white-on-white mass war, which was also fought for essentially nothing, you have the largest waste of genetic potential I can possibly imagine.

        It’s long been my theory that WWII was basically caused by the fact that all of the men who were capable of stopping it from happening were already dead, having been killed in WWI.

        • Red says:

          Lets take the civil war for example: Goal of the north: subjugate the south and destroy it’s ability to fight (I.E. wipe out the men most likely to fight back). It achieved that goal while taking a mass of largely worthless northern troops gathered through conscription and reducing their number through attrition to the men most likely to fight effectively. The remaining troops under union arms were quite good soldiers.

          If you believe the genetic version of history then you have to examine the idea that you have to kill a lot of inferior men at a given task to produce a generation of excellent men at whatever task you want to improve at. And if you’re an empire that wants to subject a nation for non military purposes it’s best to cull anyone willing to fight from the gene pool. The civil war served both this ends.

          • zippo the pinhead says:


            Um, no. Since both North and South (at least among whites) shared the same basic gene pool, your analysis makes no sense. The goals of the North were ideological and political: after the war, the territory held by whites, both geographically and genetically was essentially the same, except that they were now politically and economically weakened (internally divided and at each other’s throats) and 600,000 fit breeding specimens shorter. In fact, from a genetic standpoint after the war the whites were vastly worse off for two reasons: a) the emancipated negroes presented all manner of threats to the white gene pool, both directly through race-mixing and indirectly through high imposition of social costs, and b) consider the opportunity costs of the Civil War from a genetic standpoint. If the Blues and Greys hadn’t been busy killing each other, they could have been killing Mexicans and Cubans and taking more of their land for the white genetic pool to thrive in.

            “reducing their number through attrition to the men most likely to fight effectively.”

            This is preposterous. It may have worked this way back when wars were fought with pikes and halberds or something, but a modern mechanized war with long-range artillery and so forth does not select survivors based on valor and battle skill. Who do you think survived WWI? Those who were unfit for service, or clever enough or stupid enough to remain in the rear. You know who gets killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Bold, warlike, high-skill whites. You know who survives? The sub-literate negro supply sergeant in the rear echelon.

            “The remaining troops under union arms were quite good soldiers.”

            What you mean is that the remaining troops under union arms were more experienced soldiers. Stop with the just-so stories already.

          • Red says:

            The north and the south were not the same. Check into what parts of the UK settled where in America and you’re discover a very different base stock from the guys who settled in new England. Hard working, sober and bland new England puritans traders who were not all that much like the fun loving, rough and tumble, violent southerns who were ruled by an aristocratic elite class.

            As a rule whites do not run ethic cleansing campaigns against other races. They largely run the campaign against their own race to shape it.

            America was in great shape after the civil war. We went on to subjugate the rest of the world in the next century.

            During WW2 most smart guys made it into the officer core quickly. Officers in general die a lot less than the common fighting man. Smart armies identified superior troops and generally sent them back to train other troops. More desperate armies(Japan, Germany) spilled the best of their blood to the last man. WW1/WW2 was much more random than previous wars, but not to the point that you believe. There were lots of places where better battle ability kept one man alive and fighting when the rest of platoon was mowed down. Also remember that decorated solders returned to much better marriage and reproduction opportunities due to the status they had gained through their valor.

            Remember that wars of the 20 century where about creating empires of the subjugated and not about normal conquest and population replacement that is common in history. When you want to subjugate a people you kill all of their good fighting men while leaving the weak and compliant alive to be your direct or indirect slaves.

            Please keep in mind that there is no white race shaping itself for it’s own betterment when it comes to war. There’s only tribes of whites shaping themselves and their enemies for their own benefit.

        • BJenkum says:

          France has never recovered from the sacrifice of it’s young manhood in WWI. Even to the biological level, Frenchmen today have noticeably sub par sperm count. Next war let’s send the girls.

    • jim says:

      Whites and East Asians are much better than blacks at the industrial scale mass production of murder by specialized labor. But obviously gun control does not solve this problem, rather it makes it a lot worse.

  2. Percival says:

    What I’m wondering is, if it’s a foregone conclusion that whites, as history seems to indicate, will only put up with so much abuse before fighting back (most likely after the stockholm-syndromed genetic dead-end leftists die off), then why do the elites persist in their abuse? Is it because they are, as is usually the case with elites, complacent in their power and, in the present day, hubristic in their objective-empirical mastery of their surroundings? Or is it because they, like most people, whites and non-whites alike, are simply unable to see beyond their immediate self-interest? As I understand it, even Europeans, the most future time-oriented of the races, are woefully lacking in the ability to have any thought about the future other than: “fuck it.”

    • Jake says:

      How do we know that Europeans are more “future time-oriented” than East Asians?

    • Red says:

      Mad with power is the best way to describe our elites outlook on life. They know nothing of real history and they believe their own priestly myths. There victory is so complete that they have no actual physical enemies that would caused them to be remotely realistic about their religious system.

  3. jim says:


    Fighting back is collective action to obtain a collective good.

    This requires high asabiyyah. Whites typically have the highest asabiyyah of all races, but high asabiyyah requires patriarchal control of female sexual and reproductive choices, thus feminism reduces asabiyyah

    With the world wide victory of progressivism, we encounter a world wide decline in asabiyyah, which decline as been most severe among Britons and Americans, Britain, then America, being the center of progressivism.

    To put it in terms of sexual game theory, women reward players, patriarchs reward warriors. If we still had the eighteenth century marriage system, we would still be pillaging the world.

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  5. ralph says:

    Apparently research seems to be suggesting that the largest cause in the rise in crime that peaked around 1990 and has been dropping so that is 50% lower now, is lead from the exhaust of cars burning leaded gas which was removed from US gasoline by 1995. Lead causes brain damage in the development of children’s brain’s which results in lower IQ, impulsivity, lack of empathy and smaller brain sizes. The cities with more cars has been most affected and has also had the steepest decline to where large cities are about as safe as small towns.

    • jim says:

      Possibly, on the other hand, scientific studies that produce politically desirable results are seldom true. Or to put it another way, “Scientific” studies into politically fraught issues are done by academia, and are therefore guaranteed to produce the politically correct truth, irrespective of the observable truth.

      • ralph says:

        Both US major parties want a healthy population so I don’t see what role politics has. Politicians could use the studies for their own purposes but so far I haven’t seen any mention of them and the effects have been so destructive and widespread I doubt that either party wants to touch the issue. The studies are world wide with some being over ten years old and show that violent crime increases 23 years after lead exposure in all of the countries studied. The middle east just recently stopped using leaded gas in most countries and the countries that still use leaded gas are Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma) and Yemen, all militaristic or violent countries. The Romans use lead acetate as a sweetener and they were known as a fairly violent empire. The author Kevin Drum is from Mother Jones a liberal paper but the studies are from established nonpolitical organizations like the National Bureau of Economic Research. One can turn on the TV any night and see senseless acts all over the country and the world but when a large portion of the population may being suffering from brain damage that would affect their reasoning the violence does make more sense. The main article has links to the studies but the links are embedded in the text near the end of the main article so they are a bit hard to find. Read the studies yourself and see for yourself if they make sense. Some are following people from childhood to adulthood and testing their lead levels as they grow up and whether they commit violent crimes, some are MRI studies of the brains of people that were exposed to lead as children.

        • jim says:

          Both US major parties want a healthy population

          Both US parties want to provide jobs and welfare to unemployables to vote Democrat (observe who gets hired for the TSA and DMV), thus are fond of finding problems that supposedly need government to solve.

          I don’t know the truth about lead poisoning, but I do know the truth about sulfur oxide pollution. The environmental protection agency has a bookcase full of studies, mostly done by “scientists” with an intellect not much higher than that of a TSA employee, supposedly proving that very low levels of sulfur oxides cause all kind of harm.

          On the big Island of Hawaii, however, the volcano pays no attention to EPA rules. The ailments alleged in the bookshelf of scientific stuides set in at high enough levels – set in when sulfur dioxide levels are about one thousand times above EPA limits, set in when the volcanic smog is so thick as to make driving dangerous.

          The studies are from established nonpolitical organizations like the National Bureau of Economic Research.

          The National Bureau of Economic Research is reasonably impartial, but individual papers produced by it are not necessarily so. The paper you cite argues that lead was phased out, then crime declined twenty years later. The significance is inflated by treating each state as a separate experiment, even though all states phased out lead at approximately the same time.

          The main evidence in the paper published by the NBER is its citation of papers not published by the NBER

          The strong evidence for the substantial association of lead with crime is Dietrich, K. N., R. M. Douglas, et al., 2001. “Early exposure to lead and juvenile delinquency,” Neurotoxicology and Teratology, 23 (6), p. 511-518 and a bunch of other Dietrich papers. They are in a politically correct institution, and all their papers come to politically correct conclusions.

          Dietrich is in the Department of Environmental Health, Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH 45267-0056, USA

          The Department of Environmental Health may well be reporting the truth about lead. I don’t know one way or the other, but I know it is not reporting the truth about sulfur oxides.

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  7. ralph says:

    What is being described as race should probably be described as culture. The genetic difference between Europeans and Africans are mainly adoptions that help survive the cold winters in Europe vs the hot climate of Africa. The biggest factor in violent crime seems to be childhood exposure to lead from cars using leaded gas. Since lead was removed from gasoline violent crime rates have dropped some 50% compared to its high in the 1990’s and 77% in big cities where lead exposure was the highest. Poverty is also a large factor in property crimes.

  8. jim says:


    The most drastic cultural intervention of them all, interethnic adoption, does not change much.


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